


The fire shall never make thee shrink

by Aesoleucian



Series: every night and all [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Other, because how else are you going to get useful work out of kakashi, in which team 7 become track and subdue specialists, noncanon pronouns once again for itachi kisame and orochimaru
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-02-06 07:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 20,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12812826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Orochimaru doesn't come for Sasuke during the chuunin exams. She has the body she wanted already, after all.





	1. Chapter 1

Team 7 wasn’t the first to make it to the tower, but they made decent time despite how utterly useless Sakura is. And Naruto. The two of them keep vowing to stop being useless, but so far it hasn’t seemed to stick. As evidenced by Sakura being knocked out in the preliminary stage of phase three… but surprisingly, not Naruto. He’ll probably lose his first match anyway, since it’s against Hyuuga Neji, someone who isn’t completely incompetent.

Sasuke has more important things to worry about, because he has been matched with Gaara of the Desert, who is rumored to drink the blood of his enemies after crushing them. Sasuke doesn’t _feel_ fear, obviously, so he just finds it disgusting. But if he’s going to win (to _survive_ ) he needs a secret weapon against Gaara’s sand. He has been turning it over in his head while he practices and practices and practices Rock Lee’s super speed, and come to the conclusion that what he needs is a lightning release jutsu.

The only problem with that is that his idiot sensei is nowhere to be found. Sasuke has to resort to tracking him down as if it weren’t _literally his job_ to teach Sasuke how to stay alive in battle. Thus, after three days of tracking and information gathering, Sasuke is royally pissed and not inclined to politeness:

“Kakashi. Do your damn job and teach me a lightning jutsu.”

Kakashi looks over the top of his book and down at Sasuke from the roof he’s sitting on. “Well, how rude! Not even a ‘please’ from my grumpiest student.”

“ _Please_ teach me a technique that will allow me to beat a demonic Sand nin,” he says through gritted teeth. “I can’t believe I have to ask for this. What does the Hokage pay you for?”

“Mostly for killing people,” says Kakashi, totally failing to address Sasuke’s request. He jumps down from the roof, making no sound on the street as he lands. And immediately opens his stupid porn book again. “What did you have in mind?”

“Lightning release is strong against the sand he uses. Teach me chidori.”

Kakashi snaps his book shut and gives Sasuke maybe the first serious look he’s ever seen from the man. “All right.”

 

After the second week of trying to learn chidori, Sasuke is more frustrated than he’s ever been. He perseveres. He has to stay alive, because if he doesn’t she’ll never—

 

After eighteen days of trying to learn chidori, he gets it. And immediately has to go home and sleep, because his chakra is entirely exhausted. The final is tomorrow.

 

The final goes wrong around him—or he thinks it does. For some reason everyone in the crowd is screaming and yelling, but he can’t afford to take his eyes off Gaara for a second. Do they know something he doesn’t about what’s going on inside that sphere of sand—?

 

The rest of the day is a series of confusing impressions, very like what he can remember of the fight with Zabuza, before his sharingan activated. He wishes he could remember more clearly just _what_ was inside of Gaara, but it was too big.

And it was _Naruto_ who defeated it.

Sasuke seethes. But there’s nothing he can do except destroy another training ground, get faster, force his pool of chakra to grow. Attend a funeral. Nag Kakashi, because clearly he’s not willing to train him otherwise. Kakashi is starting to become even more evasive, cancelling his appointment with Sasuke to discuss training—and after Sasuke agreed to pay for lunch! What more could he _possibly_ be doing to cater to this, this… Sasuke doesn’t even have a word strong enough to express his frustration with the man. Literally any teacher would be better. How can he yammer constantly about teamwork and not notice his hypocrisy in refusing to help any of his students get strong enough to _be_ a team? Sakura and Naruto are going to be totally useless forever. It’s almost enough to make Sasuke give up and try to train them _himself_.

…Not really _that_ almost.

So Sasuke tracks Kakashi to his home again—and finds him comatose. There are jounin gathered around him, ready to take him to the hospital. Somehow they haven’t noticed Sasuke, or are ignoring him. He sharpens his ears to hear them talking in low voices.

“She’s back, said she was looking for the Uzumaki kid,” one murmurs.

“What did she _do_ to him?” says another. “I didn’t know the sharingan could do that.”

Sasuke’s breath catches in his chest. Kakashi met Itachi. She was _here_ , and next she’ll be wherever Naruto is…

He has to go.

He panics so many times on the way, losing the trail and running in the same direction just hoping to find it again, but he does. He finds them in an inn in Shukuba: Naruto backed into a corner, bruised and growling; his sister standing over him with a sword; a two-meter tall man in the same black cloak, gray-skinned and smiling a pointy smile.

Sasuke can’t even speak. He wants so badly to believe it wasn’t her—he _has_ believed, desperately, for five years that it wasn’t—but here she is about to kill his teammate. She turns. “Sasuke,” she says, expressionless. “You’ve grown up. But not enough to take me down, I think.” Her eyes are red, red, red. He shouldn’t look. He can’t look away.

“Is it true, then?” he says. “Tell me they lied. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

“You always have been foolish, little brother. Do you want me to show you?” Her sharingan spin and change, and he _shouldn’t be looking_ , this is what she did to Kakashi. His sister, his _sister_!

“So this is your brother?” says a deep voice. He barely registers the gray-skinned man looking over Itachi’s shoulder. “What a little twerp. You might as well give up on him ever posing a challenge. Better to fight someone who’s worth your time.”

Sasuke can barely spare the brainpower to be indignant right now, but also he hopes he’ll get to kill this man some day. He looks like he’s from Kiri. A chidori should do for him.

“There’s no harm in letting him ripen for a little longer,” says Itachi, still totally expressionless. Sasuke shivers, rooted to the spot. What does she mean by talking about him like this? What does she want?

“Why?” he asks.

“To test my capabilities. No other reason.” She closes her eyes, taking away the threat for a moment.

She… she wants him to grow up strong enough to fight her? He can _do_ that, he can—

A huge blur crashes through one of the walls, Jiraiya of the Sannin. Itachi and the shark man vanish, and Sasuke is left, more or less, alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which, shockingly, sasuke & co are able to get some use out of kakashi

After that it’s back to D-ranks, which Sasuke finds the most frustrating of all. He should be doing something to find his sister, should be growing strong enough to face her and demand the truth. Instead he’s painting fences and catching that _damned_ cat for the fourteenth time.

It only takes two D-ranks for him to snap, really, and then he’s standing in front of Kakashi to prevent him from leaving like he always does. “When are you going to teach us something?” he demands. Behind Kakashi, Naruto and Sakura look shocked.

“You have no appreciation for everything I’ve already taught you?” It’s a fake lamentation, one that Sasuke has grown very tired of.

“Fine,” he spits. “Thanks for chidori. You still haven’t taught Naruto and Sakura a single thing, so they don’t owe you any appreciation.”

Kakashi closes his book, which Sasuke is beginning to think is supposed to be an intimidation tactic, and turns to look at the other two. “What is it you want to learn?”

“Cool jutsu!” says Naruto immediately.

“They said in the academy I was a genjutsu type,” offers Sakura, quietly, after a pause. She sounds _apologetic_ about asking her teacher to teach her something. Disgusting.

“Hmm,” says Kakashi. He turns around and starts walking away, forcing them all to follow. “Most of the jutsu I know can’t really be used by genin. You’re too weak and slow. So!” Sasuke can hear the smile in his voice again, and loathes it. “Conditioning!”

He’s stalling. Sasuke is certain of it. He’s also certain that _he_ , at least, is not too weak and slow to use Kakashi’s jutsu. He already has one, after all. To add even more insult, Kakashi doesn’t even train them himself, just tells them to join Team Gai’s conditioning training.

At least Gai knows what he’s doing, and actually _teaches_. Within two months even Sakura has basic competency in running, dodging, taijutsu, and aim with shuriken. Still, it takes Naruto throwing another tantrum during a roofing mission to make Kakashi take them on a C-rank. “What kind of C-rank would you like?” he asks with suspicious politeness.

Naruto and Sakura didn’t seem to be aware that there were _kinds_ of C-ranks, so Sasuke says, “Tracking and retrieval.”

“Interesting choice,” says Kakashi. He knows damn well why Sasuke wants to learn tracking and retrieval. “Come along, let’s see if the Hokage has anything for us.”

And for the first time, they see Kakashi in his element. It’s bewildering how… how willing he is to teach. He points out visual signs of their target’s passing for Sasuke’s sharingan. He summons his dogs to talk to Naruto about scent tracking. He tells Sakura that genjutsu is extremely useful for ambush tactics, and that she could probably train herself to be a sensor type. He lets them each hunt for their own signs of the target, and Sasuke is strangely delighted when they all end up agreeing with Kakashi’s conclusions. Of course, they still learn nothing about how Kakashi subdues the target, because he might spontaneously die if he were ever too helpful, but subduing targets can wait for another time.

Maybe Gai can help.

 

They start taking more and more C-ranks, mostly escort and courier missions because of availability, but on one occasion the Hokage tells them that every C-rank track-and-subdue has gone to them for the last three months. Kurenai, she says, is complaining that team 7 always gets there first. Kakashi smiles his irritating smile, but Sasuke is satisfied. When he asked yesterday, Kakashi told him that all they need to move up to B-ranks is to get better on the “subdue” part, so for training they’ve been running mock fights. For the first month Sasuke usually had to play the target, to get Naruto and Sakura used to fighting someone above their skill level.

And then the gap wasn’t big enough any more, and Kakashi had to be the target. Sasuke doesn’t know what to do with that. Should he redouble his efforts to stay ahead, or should he be glad that his team will be of some use to him? Does he even _want_ them with him when he finds Itachi? Increase his chances of winning, or keep his heart hidden as it should be?

He has struggled with that question for a long time, but hasn’t come to an answer.

He shakes his head minutely and takes the mission scroll as Sakura passes it to him, careful not to touch her fingers. She doesn’t need any encouragement, even if she’s keeping quieter now. _Target: high C-rank missing-nin Togira Koirou. Last seen: Tono Town, southern Grass Country. Abilities: good shurikenjutsu, up to B-rank wind release, emotion-altering genjutsu._ Sasuke activates his sharingan briefly to memorize the information and the picture of the man, and then passes it to Naruto, for all the good it will do him. His memory is awful, but he keeps diligently trying to memorize their mission scrolls.

Then they run for two straight days to Tono (not even breathing all that heavily, Sasuke notes proudly), and without having to be told they split up to search the edges of town. It’s Naruto who ends up finding the trace—eight days old, he says. But Togira isn’t incredibly skilled at hiding his traces, so it’s faster for Sasuke to take point, cataloguing every sign of his passage.

They don’t get much sleep, taking two three-hour shifts per night. If Togira is resting as little as they are, he will be tiring. On the third day Sakura looks suddenly northward and says, “He’s been trying to double back more. I think he knows we’re on his trail.” She looks away, and Sasuke catches the edge of a private smile of satisfaction. He can almost hear her thinking it: Togira wasn’t expecting a sensor type to come after him. By trying to throw them off, he cut days off their chase.

They catch up just before sunset on the fifth day, and since he has decent ears he’s waiting for them. He fights like a trapped rat, stronger for his desperation, but Kakashi lets his team take care of it. Sasuke feels a thrill. This is the first time he’s properly stepped back to let them handle the subdue part, so Sasuke is determined to do this with absolute perfection. “Lay,” he says softly, to signal Sakura to start casting her net. Then, “Heel.” A private joke after Naruto acted like a dog given too much leash one too many times. Naruto growls and circles around to the back, leaving shadow clones behind him like afterimages, and waits. Sasuke is still engaging Togira, as he’s the best at straightforward combat, but for all his skill he doesn’t have the stamina of a grown man. That’s where his team comes in: Togira’s steps start to waver as his inner ear is thrown off by the genjutsu, Sasuke comes in close to hold him kunai-to-kunai, and Naruto pounces. Desperate, Togira slashes across his throat— _poof_. Naruto hits the back of his knees and he crumples to the ground, but lashes out again— _poof_. Sasuke kicks the knife out of his hand and steps on each of his wrists, deliberately. And Sakura emerges from the trees to touch one finger to his forehead, sending him to sleep.

Kakashi reappears in the aftermath, while Sakura is tying Togira up and Sasuke is tending to his own wounds. “Well done,” Kakashi says. “That was very neat. Perhaps unnecessarily neat, but you’ll learn when you can fudge it. Who can tell me where the nearest bounty station is?”

Sasuke half-closes his eyes to search his memory of the map he looked at. He’s still trying to overlay it on the landscape and calculate where they are when Naruto says, “Most of a day that way,” and points roughly northwest. Sasuke stares at him. How does he know that so immediately? “But if we’re going back home anyway, we should go to the one that’s _that_ way so we don’t have to double back, even though it’s a day and a half.”

“Right you are, Naruto,” says Kakashi. “Lead the way. Sakura, up front with Naruto, keep your feelers out. Sasuke, rear guard.” Damn. He wanted to ask Naruto how he knew that. But there will be plenty of time when they make camp in a few hours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm rereading this chapter and going "wow kakashi is such a bad teacher he should be arrested. his students should be seized and given to someone competent." and then I realize there's not a single competent teacher in konoha because kishimoto doesn't know shit about teaching. dude. let me design your ninja curriculum. please.
> 
> also you might be wondering about togira's emotion-altering genjutsu. the real reason is I forgot about it halfway through writing this, but the canonical reason is that sasuke tries so monumentally hard to ignore his fucked up emotions at all times that he just didn't notice.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's right! we have intercalary non-sasuke chapters. in this one shisui is mad about being corporeal after spending five years being mad about being incorporeal. kiri takes sword _play_ very seriously.

Shisui is very, very ready to be a human again. But here’s the thing: it sucks. Being a human sucks. He has to keep remembering to eat things himself and for the first month he’s always tired when he tries to move. His body is twenty-one years old as it should be, but it doesn’t have any of the conditioning he worked so hard to build. Instead of being useful for killing people, now he’s a burden on Itachi and Kisame. They never let it show but he _is_. So he makes himself useful in as many small ways as he can, and works harder than he ever has to get his body into fighting shape as Itachi diligently stalks every scrap of information on Orochimaru’s hideouts.

His cousin got scary while he was dead. He misses being taller than her; now they are exactly the same height, to within a millimeter. That’s especially frustrating because he could have been nearly Kisame’s height. He hates looking up at zir. Well, okay, he loves it, but you know. Principle of the thing.

Today Shisui is doing exercises with his stolen sword beside Kisame while Itachi scribbles tiny shorthand on a map of the elemental countries as big as a futon. Kisame is teaching him exercises from Kiri, which are different from the ones he knows, in pretty interesting ways. Right now the most interesting way they’re different is that Kisame is doing them with zir shirt off. But, uh, additionally, he wasn’t expecting so many partner exercises. Kisame seems happy to have someone new to do them with, because Itachi is a boringly serious practice partner. Shisui knows; he’s been her sword for most of those practices.

“It’s not a _form_ ,” Kisame tells him, sounding amused. “Think of it as a dance. You can execute it with precision if you want, but it’s less fun that way.” Ze lunges with zir wakizashi—why does ze even have one? What sword could claim to be a companion to Samehada?—and lets it hiss centimeters from Shisui’s ear.

“In Konoha the advice you generally get is to start with perfection and then move on to fluidity,” says Shisui, nudging the blade aside with the armored guard on the back of his left hand. He tries a strike to zir side, but he’s dismally slow.

“Bullshit,” says Kisame contentedly. “Perfection in any form won’t do you any good in the wild. The slow are meat, and the adaptable eat. You need to do more agility exercises.”

“I _am_ doing agility exercises. _You’re_ an agility exercise. Ugh, can’t we do taijutsu?”

“At least finish this exercise, Shisui-san.”

He finishes the exercise with minimal grumbling, and darts off into the trees to relieve tension before he goes against Kisame again. Itachi would probably make a better training partner for him, but she’s as single-minded as always. He does a silly acrobatic turnaround to express his feelings, and then notices that the forest is a little too quiet. He turns his head back over his shoulder and activates his single sharingan, searching out clues. At the limit of what he can see through the trees, something is moving. He takes the long way around, very careful not to disturb any leaves, and finds a rather strange-looking woman—strawlike yellow-green hair, ice-pale skin, and most damningly a purple rope tied around the waist of her loose yukata—coming through the forest toward the safehouse.

She only notices at the very last moment before the butt of Shisui’s sword is about to strike her in the back of the head, and manages to dodge aside, slightly mangling one of her ears. She spins and brings up a small knife to block him, and he blows a stream of blue-hot fire in her face. Shit. No, he can’t kill her yet. He disarms her with a chop to the wrist and spits water onto her smoldering hair.

Strange black markings begin to crawl like slugs up her burned face. Her sclera turn black and tusks grow from her mouth, and she laughs, a high chattering like a monkey. “You won’t live to take back what’s yours, Uchiha,” she says.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Right now it’s looking closer to _maybe not_ , as she backhands him into a tree. He barely manages to relax enough not to break every bone in his body, and decides that probably she’s some kind of super-strong lab experiment and he needs backup. He darts away—not flickering, not yet, because he needs her to keep up—and _wow_ that was an unnecessary concern. He flickers the rest of the way to the safehouse and nearly collapses onto one knee. “Heads up,” he manages to gasp, before she’s on them.

She goes for Kisame first, since ze’s the most obvious target. Even ze seems to have difficulty meeting her blows, and Shisui realizes that he can feel almost demonic chakra pouring off her. The best thing Shisui can do for zir is get Samehada; he flickers around the edge of the fight and picks it up. It’s a little too heavy for him, but it knows his chakra, so it lets him take it. He judges the best moment to give it to Kisame, waits until ze manages to disengage for a moment, and then flickers just close enough for a handoff.

He gets an elbow to the gut from the straw-haired woman for his trouble and staggers backward, passing Itachi as she flies toward the battle, eyes spinning. By the time he looks up again Samehada has taken a chunk out of the straw-haired woman’s side and she’s swaying in place, dazed, as she looks into Itachi’s eyes.

“Come with me,” Itachi says. “You will show me the locations of Orochimaru’s hideouts that are known to you.”

Winded and a little bruised, Shisui drifts over to stand by Kisame, though he’s not impolite enough to ask if ze’s hurt. “I doubt that Orochimaru thought she could take the two of us down with one experiment,” ze says. “She must be playing some deeper game.”

“Intimidation? Seems like a waste of a perfectly good freaky experiment. Could be to plant information that will lead us into an ambush.”

“Perhaps. I’m sure that’s not all she knows, though. I trust Itachi-san to find any traps Orochimaru has laid.”

“Trust her to be paranoid, you mean,” says Shisui fondly. Over by the door, his cousin is watching intently as the straw-haired woman taps the map, murmuring something to Itachi. He glances at Kisame, and raises his eyebrows. “Are those burns?”

“Ice burns.” Kisame extends one arm to let Shisui inspect the raised welt on the back of zir forearm, where ze blocked one of the straw-haired woman’s blows. “Her chakra was freezing, although I don’t think she could use ice release. She doesn’t look like any ice bloodline ability user I’ve seen, anyway.”

“Orochimaru is _such_ a freak,” Shisui complains. “What’s even the point of that?”

“You’re one to talk,” says Kisame, amused. “As soon as you worked out how to talk you asked if you could still drink my blood.”

“Let it go! That was a month ago and I was delirious! I still thought I was a sword!” Now he’d say no to blood, but still yes to Kisame’s chakra. He remembers it being like the ocean, like a riptide. He remembers thinking he’d be content to die pulled under by it.

Kisame chuckles. “You still do think you’re a sword. We all do, though, so it’s forgivable.” Ze drops a heavy hand on his shoulder; when he glances down he can see the fine white scars criss-crossing zir knuckles. He abruptly remembers ze’s _still_ not wearing a shirt, and his face goes hot. There is almost no less romantic time to leap on zir than while watching his cousin interrogate one of Orochimaru’s lab rats, but the urge is almost irresistible.

Ze squeezes his shoulder and oh man, zir hands are so big. He looks the other direction and tries to play it cool. From Kisame’s continuing soft laughter, he’s probably failing.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which: sakura and sasuke wrangle naruto's adhd because he won't; I get stimulant tips from other adhd naruto fic I've read; sakura is a match for sasuke in combat; how does sasuke know what grave dirt tastes like??

They’ve known for a while that Kakashi was sending them to the next chuunin exams—really, since they started running _real_ missions—but the knowledge that it’s in a few weeks has the whole team keyed up. In Sakura this manifests as a tendency toward quiet determination, something Sasuke has come to like about her, but Naruto has been even more hyperactive and distractible than he always is. It’s frankly exhausting, and Sasuke says this as someone who can run forty kilometers without rest if he has to. Keeping track of Naruto _shouldn’t_ be his job, but he seems to have been declared team leader. Maybe he can delegate it to Sakura.

“Naruto!” he barks for the fifth time today. “Pay attention! That could have destroyed your mind!”

Naruto looks over his shoulder with a sorrowful expression, his foot still jittering against the ground. “Sorry, bastard. I’m just _excited_. Not that you’ve ever felt an emotion besides annoyed.”

“If I feel emotions, you don’t see them. That’s how a shinobi should be. You should be able to take the necessary action no matter what you’re feeling.”

“Look,” says Sakura, smiling apologetically. “Maybe we’ve been at it for too long. It _is_ really tricky and takes a lot of concentration. Maybe we should go back to physical training for now and keep working on genjutsu in the morning when we’re fresh?”

Sasuke grits his teeth. They don’t have time to waste on Naruto’s attention deficit. But he nods. “Fine. Naruto, why don’t you go run a lap around the village so you’re decent to interact with normal humans?”

Naruto is gone by the end of his sentence.

Sakura runs a hand through her hair. She, too, looks tired from trying to handle Naruto. “I keep feeling like there’s something I could do to make it easier for him. But I don’t know what it is.”

“Ginseng,” suggests Kakashi from the tree where he’s currently being completely useless. Sasuke thinks it’s a joke until he looks over the top of his book and says, “I’ve heard chewing on the root aids concentration.”

“Would you?” asks Sasuke, giving Sakura a look that doesn’t even approach pleading but is as close as he ever gets.

“I’m on it,” she says. She stands up a little straighter, and he feels slightly guilty for manipulating her like this. Her real problem is that she’s weak of mind and lets herself be controlled by her wish for attention and recognition, of course. He shouldn’t feel bad for it. He does anyway.

He starts doing stretches, to warm up for sparring when Naruto gets back, and Sakura follows suit.

When Naruto returns, fifty minutes later and barely breathing hard, Sasuke and Sakura have already begun an impromptu match. Sasuke is far superior in taijutsu, but he finds himself unable to land a hit on her; she uses genjutsu as a precision tool, applying it exactly when it’s needed to put him off-balance or make him miss her by a few centimeters. He activates his sharingan, but all it does is allow him to recognize when she’s about to cast a genjutsu, not what it will be or what’s happening under it.

Naruto enters the fight in the way he always does: by leaping at Sasuke to try to tackle him to the ground. This has been getting more effective lately as he actually learns stealth. And Sakura is helping him, dammit.

Sasuke finds himself lying in the dirt with Naruto sitting gleefully on his chest. “Thanks, Sakura-chan! It’d take a lot longer to take him down by myself!”

“As if you could,” says Sakura, with the tone that indicates she’s rolling her eyes. “Are you ready to spar now?”

Naruto jumps to his feet, digging his knees into Sasuke’s ribs as he does so. He doesn’t even seem to realize how much it hurt. “Yeah! Kakashi-sensei! Come fight us!”

Kakashi sighs loudly and closes his book, a hard-won concession. “My cute little students have gotten so demanding,” he says mournfully. “I remember when you were _this_ tall and you’d never dare to tell me to fight you.”

“You’ve only known us for a year!” says Sakura. Sasuke gets up to stand between his teammates, and they all take ready stances. Fighting Kakashi is harder than fighting missing-nin, not just because he’s S-rank but because he knows all their signals. It never gets any easier, because they’re not even close to caught up to him yet. It’s incredibly frustrating for Sasuke to feel like he’s getting nowhere, but then he goes into the field and realizes how rapidly he’s improving. Though he would never say it, he’s extremely fortunate to have Hatake Kakashi as a teacher.

Then Naruto dashes out to meet Kakashi kunai-to-kunai, and Sasuke, exasperated, follows to support him.

 

The first stage of the exams is being held in Konoha, to emphasize to everyone else that Konoha and Suna are allies now. Most likely Naruto is the only one on the team who thinks it’s genuine, not having any political understanding of reparations. In any event, it’s not a difficult test. _Any_ genin team ought to have the ability to communicate something basic like a single number. Sasuke can’t help but suspect that the room where all the thumping and distant shouting comes from is the one Naruto is in.

As soon as the first test is over, they are told to run to Suna. It wouldn’t be a bad run, except that in order to get there first they won’t be able to rest. They’re going to run for three days straight. Sakura hands around soldier pills, which taste like grave dirt but Sasuke knows from experience that they work.

Running for three days isn’t so bad, really. It’s almost meditative, at least after Naruto runs out of cheerful platitudes and inane commentary. He’s taking point because he knows the land better than anyone—it’s not as if there’s a _road_ to Suna, so they’ll need this advantage. They stop about every four hours for water and a little bit of food they can barely stomach; every third stop it’s soldier pills. Sakura is clearly flagging by the end of the second day, but there’s nothing they can do to help her. Even Naruto doesn’t have the spare energy to carry her. So they go on.

Running in the desert is like running on water—it’s Sakura who realizes this. On deep sand, chakra is needed to make sure it’s solid. Sasuke doesn’t like wasting chakra through his feet, but he does it. And soon enough he can see the cliffs that surround Suna. Two kilometers behind them, Sakura reports breathlessly, there is another team. They sprint to the pavilion in the shadow of the cliffs, where Naruto collapses.

Sasuke walks slow circles around the tent while Sakura is kicking Naruto to get up and do cooldown. A proctor offers him water, and he drinks probably more it than is healthy. There’s even fresh fruit, and after the burning sun it seems chilled. They were the first team that made it here. Sasuke attributes it to all the track-and-subdue missions; long-distance running is their trade.

He stays up on watch to let his teammates sleep as the other genin teams arrive. The next four are from Suna, he observes, and then one from Ame, and then the Konoha teams start coming in. Sasuke wakes Naruto and curls up in the sand behind him, because his vision has started to blur and he won’t be any use.

Only once he’s half asleep can he admit it to himself: he didn’t want to go off watch until more Konoha nin were here.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nothing actually happens in this chapter. team 7 does some combo jutsu. naruto sulks. sakura plays her opponent like a violin. sasuke gets wrecked.

The second phase takes place in the Demon Desert, Suna’s answer to the Forest of Death. Apparently it’s filled with enormous, poisonous animals just like Training Ground 44, and many of the plants are dangerous too. Sasuke surveys it while behind him Naruto is excitedly yelling at some foreign genin.

“Sasuke! You bastard!” says Naruto’s loud voice in his ear, accompanied an arm slung around his neck. He twitches. “You should be friends with Fuu-chan! Help her get to a hundred!”

Sasuke elbows Naruto in the face and tries to sweep his legs out from under him, but Naruto has gotten disappointingly good at dodging lately. He turns around and directs a contemptuous look at Naruto, Sakura, and three Taki genin. “I’m not here to make friends, dead last.”

“Call me that again!” Naruto howls. He launches himself at Sasuke and starts trying to take him down with taijutsu. Sasuke could stop him easily, using his sharingan, but he doesn’t want to reveal his abilities yet. In fact, he’s so used to fighting with sharingan that Naruto _beats him_. He should practice more without them. “Dead last, huh?” says Naruto, looking as smug as any cat.

“Yes,” Sasuke tells him. “I wasn’t really trying.”

“Bastard!!”

 

In the desert itself, the teams are spread out so far that none of them can see each other. There won’t be scent traces either until they cross paths, so they walk toward the old watchtower in the center of the desert until Sakura senses another team three kilometers to the southeast. “They’re not Konoha,” she says, “but I can’t tell more than that.” She glances back at Sasuke and bites her lip. “Do you want to try the three-person genjutsu? We’d only need to get a little closer.”

Sasuke nods, and when Naruto starts to say something (excited, loud, probably inane) he makes a hand signal for silence. Then gestures: _let’s go_. They stop a kilometer and a half away, where Sasuke’s sharingan can barely pick out three figures, and the other two form up behind him in an outward-facing triangle, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. Rat, boar, snake, hare, snake. Sasuke’s eyes bore into them until they stop suddenly. He can feel them trying to break out, but they can only break one person’s hold at a time. “Approach,” he says. “Remember to hold your seal, Naruto.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it! Jeez. I’m not _totally_ incompetent, y’know!” He’s not, really. He’s learned how to shut up occasionally, and he can do a nontrivial amount of ninjutsu. It still doesn’t justify his attitude.

As they reach the other team, Sasuke sees that they’re from Suna. “Knock them out?” asks Sakura. “Or should we leave them a chance to pass anyway if they get two scrolls?”

“In a real mission, they’d be dead now,” says Sasuke. “Knock them out. Less competition during the combat phase anyway.”

Naruto is the one who unclasps his hands and knocks out the three Suna genin with quick blows to the temple, because he’s a less stable support for the two-person genjutsu. Once they’re down, Sakura reinforces it with a sleeping genjutsu, and they all start searching for the scroll.

“Bad luck,” says Sakura, holding it up. “Earth as well.” Sasuke shrugs, she pockets it, and they continue toward the watchtower.

Three giant scorpions, one team of Ame genin, and a narrow escape from a collapsed ruin later, Team 7 has three earth scrolls and they’re all beginning to get frustrated. They make camp on the leeward side of a clump of rocks sticking up out of the sand; Sasuke takes watch while Sakura and Naruto argue about genjutsu and barrier seals in low voices at the edge of the camp. It’s rather peaceful, until their arguing gets too loud and attracts a pack of skinny desert wolves. Sasuke is ready to run them off with a few well-placed shuriken, but Naruto transforms into a _tiger_ of all things to scare them. “I still don’t understand how you do that,” Sasuke hears Sakura telling him. “Can’t ninjutsu only transform you into another person?”

“Yeah, but it can turn you into a person who’s a different size. And if you think about it, a tiger’s just a person who’s a _really_ different size.”

Sasuke snorts to himself and pulls out the storage seals Sakura has filled with food. Although they were filled almost a week ago, the food is still hot, as if time does not pass inside. Naruto comes running quick enough once he smells it, and the argument is over for as long as his mouth is full.

 

In the end, the exam is cancelled. When they hear the reason why, Naruto goes strangely silent. If Team 7 had been less perfectly efficient at their job, there is a chance they would have been able to help Gaara and Fuu—jinchuuriki like Naruto. Or so Naruto seems to believe. In Sasuke’s opinion, Naruto would have just been in danger of getting killed protecting foreign ninja.

Naruto sulks all the way home, and all through his match against someone named Gennai in the impromptu tournament the Hokage sets up. Brooding makes him vicious in a way he seldom is; Gennai scarcely has time to form hand seals for a fire release technique before Naruto transforms into a hawk mid-leap and knocks him out with a blow to the temple. There’s an interested murmur from the small crowd, and Sasuke permits himself a slight, grim smile. His team will stand out here.

Sakura is more merciful—she draws out her fight with Kiba to let him show some of his more impressive techniques, and then immediately sends him to sleep with a contact genjutsu while they’re fighting hand-to-hand. The message couldn’t be clearer: she has the sense to downplay her abilities when necessary, but the skill not to need to.

Unsurprisingly the crowd grows half again as large just before Sasuke is set to fight Hyuuga Neji. He assumes the Hokage did this on purpose, to generate interest and save face. Sasuke has always thought of her as craftier than the Third. And Sasuke won’t be able to use genjutsu here, although his sharingan will help him counter Neji’s gentle fist style. He takes a neutral stance, neither defensive nor offensive, and meets Neji’s eyes. At almost the same moment he activates his sharingan, the veins around Neji’s eyes bulge out and his scowl grows even deeper. Sasuke has no doubt that they will both be promoted; neither does he doubt that nothing less than winning the tournament will do for either of them.

They move at the same time, too. Sasuke is on the defensive, but he doesn’t mind; he’s sure he has more stamina, and the agility not to get hit. The Hyuuga aren’t very flexible in technique. Neji continues persistently trying to defeat Sasuke with the same style, and Sasuke continues to fend him off. Even the so-called ultimate attack, eight trigrams sixty-four palms, can’t touch him. But neither can he hit Neji. When he tries, he is deflected by taijutsu or by eight trigrams palms revolving heaven. It also deflects his fire release and his shuriken.

There is only one place where the technique doesn’t defend him: under his feet.

Experimentally, Sasuke tries Sakura’s D-rank earthquake jutsu to see if it will destabilize Neji. It doesn’t take. He tries shadow clones; they don’t help. Anything he does, Neji can see through it. But isn’t he getting tired? How much chakra has he expelled?

Sasuke can’t keep his lip from curling into a snarl as he perches in one of the trees in the makeshift arena, staring down at Neji. There has to be a solution. He _refuses_ to be beaten by a _genin_. If he can’t even defeat Neji, how is he going to—

The tree he’s in falls, and he has to leap to the next one. He can _see_ that the flow of Neji’s chakra is weakening, just as he knows the same of his own. He hates himself for coming to rely on his teammates. They won’t always be there. No-one will _always_ be there. The only constant in the life of a shinobi is death. And if he can’t deal it out _what good is he_?

Sasuke jumps down and goes back on the defensive. He will wear Neji down.

 

Uchiha Sasuke and Hyuuga Neji are both removed from the tournament in a double knockout. Sakura defeats Naruto but loses first place to Shino, an ignominious defeat for Team 7. Instead of sleeping, Sasuke spends the whole night in the library looking up area-effect elemental ninjutsu. He won’t let himself be defeated again.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh! this one's very short. it's literally nothing but breaking and entering.

Chuunin Team Kakashi is precisely the same as Genin Team 7, except that they now take B-rank missions. There are a lot more track-and-subdue missions that are assigned B ranks. Tracking doesn’t get harder—there are very few shinobi who are actually trained for throwing off pursuit, and now that Sakura has a dog it’s simpler than ever—but subduing does.

With three of them, though, it’s rarely extraordinarily difficult. With four, it’s downright easy.

Sasuke chafes. Where is his sister?

He has asked Kakashi, he has asked the mission desk, he has asked the Intelligence Division in person, he has even asked the _Hokage_. At least she was honest: rather than saying she didn’t know, she told him he didn’t have the clearance.

“How do I get clearance?” he demanded of her.

She snorted. “Make ANBU.”

Which means Sasuke is going to have to steal the information. It will make him a traitor if anyone finds out, but he’s reasonably well-trained in infiltration, and he’s unlikely to get caught.

The files are probably somewhere in the lower levels of the Intelligence Division building; he wakes up at two and makes his way in at two thirty, late enough that the streets are finally empty but not yet time for even the most unreasonably dedicated to be at work. His sharingan show him tripwires, seals, and traps, easy enough to avoid. More difficult are the locked doors. He’s regretting turning his nose up at Naruto’s offer to teach him to pick locks, but there’s no help for it now. He’s only able to get two levels down before a door locked with a simple tumbler stops him. He’ll come back later.

 

He has to ask before Kakashi shows up, of course. That leaves only an hour and a half, as Sakura has said that the man often lurks for several hours before showing himself. She long ago stopped calling him out for it, because evidently he would just vanish and then come even later, as if to punish them. Today, Sasuke softens Naruto up by indulging him in a spar first. Then he says, “There’s something I want you to demonstrate.”

“Oh, yeah? I’m telling you, you literally _can’t_ learn mass shadow clone.”

Ah, yes. How did Sasuke forget that he’s infuriating? “Not that. Lockpicking. I want to qualify for infiltration missions.”

Naruto brightens. “Sure! So you’re finally admitting I know something you don’t! Hey, hey, Sakura—”

“You know _many_ things I don’t, most of which I have no desire to learn. Come on.”

Sakura trails after them to the market warehouses without speaking. She knows she’s not wanted, but she’s trying to pretend it isn’t true. Meanwhile, Naruto fishes a set of lockpicks out of a small pocket in his weapons pouch. “Okay, watch close. First, get one of the tumblers. Then torque wrench. That keeps the rest from going back into place when you go to the next one, see? Then you just kinda go for it!” Only fifteen seconds later, the padlock clicks open, and Naruto turns around to smile at him. “See?”

Sasuke shoulders him aside to try for himself. It’s much more difficult than Naruto made it seem, but he does get it eventually. It must be one of those things that depends on practice rather than skill. While Sakura kneels down to try, Sasuke says, “What about doors with chakra alarms? Normally you can’t disarm them unless they’re keyed to your signature.”

“Oh!” Sasuke barely glances at Sakura, thinking she managed to get the lock open, but she says, “There are seals for that! If you stick them to the door, the basic kind will disable most kinds of alarms. There are more specialized ones, though, depending on how secure the place is that you’re breaking into.”

“Show me,” says Sasuke.

“Hey, hey, anyone’d think you were going to break into somewhere without us!” says Naruto, elbowing Sasuke in the side. “Team Kakashi’s got to stay together, y’know!”

“Hm,” says Sasuke.

 

Irritatingly enough, they both come with him, despite all his preparations. Somehow, they knew (they _are_ trackers too); when he makes it to the lobby of the Intelligence Division building, they’re there waiting for him under one of Sakura’s clever genjutsu. He ignores them, and neither of them says anything. It’s as if this was the plan from the beginning. It’s better than the humiliating alternative.

With Naruto’s lock-picking skills and Sakura’s seals, it’s much easier to get into the deepest level of the building. The entire floor is one enormous dark room filled wall-to-wall with filing cabinets. Sasuke’s sharingan fly from label to label and he realizes that the most recent files are the furthest from the stairs. When he digs into them, it doesn’t take him long to find the file on _Akatsuki_. He flips through a hundred and forty-three pages, looking at each of them just long enough to memorize it, and then snaps the file shut. Another few minutes gets him Itachi’s file, and he memorizes that too. “I’ve got what I needed,” he says. “Time to go.”

They follow him home.

Irritating.

Once the danger of getting caught has passed, Naruto says, “So? So? What’d you find? You’ve gotta tell us!”

“I don’t know,” says Sasuke. “It was encrypted.”

Both their faces fall, but a moment later Sakura has put on a mask of determination. “Well, we’ll need the time it takes to decrypt, anyway. We have to figure out how to deal with Kakashi-sensei.”

Sasuke glares at them. They don’t go away. He continues to glare until Naruto, totally unaffected, gets bored and pushes past him into the house. “Hey, so, so, do you have any snacks? I didn’t sleep at _all_ , and I always get hungry when I don’t sleep…”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uchiha are soooo stupiddddd. actually sasuke isn't doing as bad as he could be but itachi is the stupidest person on NINJA EARTH. she thinks with her drama gland not her brain
> 
> oh right also more self harm in this one

The base in Rice Paddy Country seems the most likely to have genetic samples and information on the cloning process. More importantly, Orochimaru is not there at the moment. She will, of course, keep the most important information with her at all times, but if they can destroy her backups first it will make things easier.

Itachi, still the quietest among them, goes to scout out the guard rotations. Her sharingan memorize them without her having to do any work, so she just sits on a high branch of a tree and listens for any potential ambush. By the time she’s satisfied she’s starting to feel anxiety squirming in the pit of her stomach, so she unsheathes her sword, rolls up one sleeve, and makes a careful cut. She allows her eyes to close, just for a moment, to feel the pain as fully as she can. It settles her. She cleans her sword and heals the cut—just enough that it won’t open again when she fights—and then she goes back to where Shisui and Kisame are waiting to tell them the plan.

First: Itachi and Shisui infiltrate the laboratory and medical data storage. They will need to find Orochimaru’s private rooms as well, just to be safe.

Then, while Kisame distracts the guards out front: they set fires to destroy the evidence.

Itachi thinks it’s rather too easy. No-one even sees her and Shisui until they return outside to attack the back entrance of the base with great streams of fire. Then there’s fighting to be done, but no amount of nature chakra can make Orochimaru’s experiments immune to genjutsu. It’s over quickly.

At the front entrance of the base they find Kisame leaning against the trunk of a tree, apparently dozing with Samehada propped up beside zir. But Shisui’s expression sharpens and he says, “We shouldn’t have left zir to do this alone. Ze needed your help against _one_ of her experiments.”

“Clearly that was an aberration,” says Itachi. Kisame seems to have done well, aside from the fact that ze is bleeding in many places. She kneels next to zir and calls up healing chakra. Shisui wedges himself under Kisame’s arm and is mutinously silent while she works. He only relaxes when zir hand pats him on the shoulder and zir mouth lifts into a subtle smile.

“The next nearest base is three days from here,” Itachi says. Kisame’s smile turns to raised eyebrows as ze looks out of the corner of zir eye at Itachi; ze nods. Shisui half-purses his lips and starts to chew on them. He’s worried about something. “Shisui?”

He sighs. “Nothing, cousin. The sooner we get this done, the better.”

 

They have to take a detour to run an official mission. Only dangerous people have high enough bounties for Akatsuki to take, but they don’t compare to entire bases full of Orochimaru’s people.

Shisui has to stay several kilometers away from the meeting point when they hand off the reward money to Kakuzu. Itachi frets, strangely convinced that they will return to find him missing, dead, or captured. She lets Kisame handle the necessary talking, her hand itching for her sword, and then very nearly sprints back to the safehouse.

Shisui is drawing a rather lumpy cherry tree in charcoal, which he drops immediately when the door opens. “You were gone _forever_ ,” he complains good-naturedly.

“It wasn’t even an hour,” Kisame tells him, and he smiles at zir.

“Well, come on, then. I want to get out of here. Grass country, you said?”

Itachi finds it rather strange how much more eager Shisui is now to dismantle another of Orochimaru’s bases. Perhaps, she thinks guiltily, he has grown no fonder of being left behind for his own safety. Perhaps he has grown no fonder of being trapped anywhere, even safehouses. To all appearances, he has become a little claustrophobic.

It worries Itachi. She _knows_ she damaged something in him irreparably. Even after gaining a human body he never quite lost his bloodthirstiness, his cruel sense of humor. Lately she wakes to find him gone, and when she searches he’s ‘keeping watch’ outside. It’s better when they sleep in the open, because she’ll see him sitting fifteen meters up a tree, leaning back against the trunk, before she can begin to panic. Sometimes she aches to lay down next to him so she’ll feel his chakra while she sleeps, like she has for five years. She _thinks_ he wants that too, but they’re both of them too proud to ask.

She doesn’t think the life of a missing-nin is good for him. She knows he wouldn’t leave it. He wouldn’t give up being a martyr ( _hypocrite!_ his voice says in her head), nor would he give up Kisame.

 

The second base is harder than the first. It has been fortified, she thinks; Orochimaru surely guessed where they would be next, and has laid plenty of clever traps for them. Between those and the necessity of hunting down every last survivor so no-one will be telling tales, it takes almost a week. Exhausted, the three of them make camp in the ruins of the base, surrounded on all sides by tall piles of rubble. Shisui seems cheerful. There’s a smear of blood next to his mouth, which Itachi desperately hopes is from a careless attack on someone’s jugular vein. He leans into Kisame and smiles, humming an unidentifiable tune.

In the morning Itachi wakes to find Shisui already breaking camp, sealing supplies away into scrolls. He can’t have been awake for very long—that, or he was trying to avoid waking Itachi and Kisame. “Morning, cousin!” he whispers. “I already made soup. Have I mentioned lately how much I love having an affinity for smokeless fires?”

“Every morning,” says Itachi. She gratefully accepts a bowl of hot soup and sips it, eying Kisame to gauge whether ze is close to waking.

Instinct makes her pause, alert, and set her bowl down on the ground. She activates her sharingan and looks around the ruin. “Itachi?” asks Shisui. “Should I be worried?”

“I’m not sure,” she murmurs.

And then she is, because there’s movement at the lip of the basin of rubble surrounding them. Silhouetted against the eggshell green of the predawn sky are three human figures. One of them is terribly familiar.

“Sasuke!” crows Shisui, as always unconcerned with the leaden feeling in the pit of Itachi’s stomach. “You got so tall! Haha, or is that just because you’re standing all the way up there?” Kisame sits up on zir bedroll, groping for Samehada, only half awake but clearly ready to fight if need be. “Well, come down, come down, we have soup. Is that your genin team?”

One of Sasuke’s teammates takes a few steps before realizing that Sasuke isn’t following, and skids to a halt, sending chunks of stone and clouds of dust down the hill. “What,” says the boy, “d’you think they poisoned it or something?”

“Who are you,” says Sasuke. “Akatsuki travel in pairs.”

“Akatsuki doesn’t know about me. Would you come _down_ here? It’s weird yelling up at you!”

Sasuke flickers down to land in the flat space they cleared to bed down in. This close, Itachi can see that he looks tired and grim, distrustful. She picks up her bowl, wavers on offering it to him, and then takes a sip to conceal her confusion. “The name’s Uchiha Shisui. As for why you don’t recognize me, that’s a long sto—howhoah! No need to be hostile!” Shisui dodges a thrust from Sasuke’s shortsword, and then flickers to Kisame’s side to put a restraining hand on zirs where it’s clenched around Samehada’s hilt.

“Don’t you dare claim Shisui’s name,” says Sasuke coldly. His teammates come to stand uncertainly behind him, on either side like bodyguards. It’s a relief, at least, that he has someone watching his back.

“Sasukeeee. You’re such a _pain_. Look, I know I died. Would you just _listen_ —”

“Sasuke,” Itachi snaps, as her brother tries to gut their cousin again. “Your form gets sloppy when you’re angry. Control yourself if you want to have a chance of injuring him.” Kisame laughs, Shisui snorts, and Sasuke turns slowly to face her. “You don’t need to believe his identity. That is not your purpose here. What is it?”

“To face you,” Sasuke snarls. “To bring you back. In chains, if I have to.”

A stabbing pain seems to hit Itachi’s chest. This, she thinks, is what love feels like. Or fear. She steadies her breathing. “You’re not strong enough,” she murmurs. “You’re only fourteen.”

“You didn’t count us when you said he’s not strong enough!” proclaims the boy standing on Sasuke’s left. He has the Yondaime’s complexion and the second kyuubi jinchuuriki’s face, as if the whisker-like scars on his cheeks weren’t enough. “We can take you on!” he shouts. Then, slightly quieter, “Only, Sakura-chan, maybe you should summon Chiyouda first, to even the odds a little.”

“They’re S-rank missing-nin—” Itachi catches Sakura hissing, before her attention snaps back to Sasuke. She lets her sharingan evolve to mangekyou, and—

Shisui slaps his hand briefly over her eyes. “None of that! This is all rubbish, Itachi. Just go home to Konoha and be with your brother. I can take care of being you, and that’s that problem solved. We’ll probably join you eventually. Oh, and we can visit! So it’s fine. Go on.”

This is not a decision Itachi can make. It fills her with dizzying despair, the thought of tearing down so easily the walls she has built. The thought of taking something she has wanted desperately for five years, just like that. Her hand twitches toward her sword, and she clenches it. This is not the time. But she can’t _think_ , with his red eyes boring into her like that. “Shisui,” she murmurs, “I can’t.”

“He’s your little brother and he loves you!” Shisui hisses. “Just, like, pretend to be their prisoner! It’ll be fine!”

She looks at him helplessly. She does not want to be without him. Whenever he’s out of her sight, she fears him dead.

He sighs and presses their foreheads together, one hand curled warmly around the back of Itachi’s neck under her hair. “I’ll visit _every month_. It’s not like you’ll be alone! You’ll have Sasuke, and his weird teammates, and our old captain, let’s see, I’m sure you can dig up Tenzou from somewhere, he’s always ready to help out. Who am I missing? Weren’t you friends with Yuugao?”

Itachi lets her breath out, and with it some of her tension. Humiliating as it is, Shisui won’t let her rest if she doesn’t do it. And if she _can_ be in two places at once, for one to be at her brother’s side is good. “You’re not a very good actor,” she says softly. “Do you think you’ll be able to pass as me?”

“What! All I have to do is grow my hair out and not talk! You’re dead easy! Imagine _you_ trying to be _me_!”

Itachi shakes her head, and steps away from him. Walks toward Sasuke feeling like she’s going to an execution, and holds out her wrists.

He binds her hands, but does not add a chakra suppression seal, and that’s when she knows she has failed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't even mean this when I wrote it but holy shit did Shisui just hypnotize Itachi to go live with her lil brother. What a prize.
> 
> I also wanted to talk about the depiction of Itachi in this and 'burn thee to the bone,' since she's such a divisive figure. what I'm going for is empathy but not sympathy, if that makes sense. Itachi is extremely mentally ill and extremely filled with self-pity, but she's also... trying really hard to make herself and her brother miserable. she lives in the sort of despair where she can kill hundreds of her family members and be like "wow the world is so horrible, this is a punishment for me." no matter how much she allegedly wished for peace, she did nothing to work toward it. I AM judging people who are complicit in atrocities because it's easier than speaking up.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke POV is back! I want you to know, in case I haven't told you already, that Sakura's dog Chiyouda is a German shepherd. They don't have Germany in ninja world so what country is the most German... a Lightning Country shepherd.

They return to camp with a prisoner. The thought is bewildering, how easy it was, how anticlimactic—ah, and Kakashi is awake and waiting for them. Chiyouda seems to be hiding behind a tree.

Kakashi holds up the note. “Sorry, sensei,” he reads out, in a perfectly sarcastic voice, “we had a secret mission to do. We’ll be back before dawn, don’t worry. Love, Team Kakashi.” He looks pointedly up at Itachi, and then at Sasuke.

“Chiyouda knows how to do a reverse summon,” Sakura explains. “If you were in danger she would have woken you up and summoned me.”

Kakashi smiles so widely that his eye closes into a crescent. “Sakura, I’m not angry because you put me in danger. I’m angry because you’ve been keeping secrets from me.”

Sakura cringes and edges half behind Naruto (as far as she can get from Itachi), trying to look as small as possible. “Tch,” says Sasuke. “Well, now you know. Happy?”

“I’m also angry,” Kakashi continues, as if he hadn’t heard, “because of your extremely lax security measures. I know you know how to secure dangerous prisoners.” He flickers to stand in front of Itachi and theatrically slaps a chakra suppression seal on the back of her hand. Sasuke’s sharingan catch the tiny relaxation in Itachi’s shoulders. Is she _relieved_?

Kakashi is looking at him expectantly, so he says, “Itachi is not an official prisoner. There is no reason for you to put her in your report.” Kakashi’s single visible eyebrow rises into his hair. “If her presence is made known, she will go on trial,” Sasuke says. “I have no doubt that they’ll fail to convict the guilty party.”

“I am the guilty party,” says Itachi softly. When Sasuke turns on her, furious, she’s looking through him into the distance.

“Shut up. Don’t lie. You don’t have any _proof_ that it was you.” He clenches his teeth on the rest of what he wanted to say. This is not the time or place to be airing the Uchiha clan’s dirty laundry. “Don’t say a word, Kakashi.”

Kakashi sits down and neatly crosses his legs. “It’s treason you’re asking of me, Sasuke. I need a better reason than _I don’t want to believe my sister would do that_. We’re not leaving until I’m convinced. Sit down, everyone.”

Sasuke grits his teeth, but he sits, as do his teammates. Itachi folds herself into a demure seiza, which makes him angry for some reason. “Fine. Itachi. Why did you do it. Don’t say _to test my abilities_ , that’s clearly bullshit. Killing children isn’t a challenge for someone like you.”

“There are many kinds of ability,” Itachi murmurs. A minute shudder runs through her. “But… you are correct. I need you to promise, Sasuke, that you will lay the blame where it belongs. Lord Third was not to blame. The village is not to blame.”

Choking horror crawls up Sasuke’s throat, making it hard to breathe. “Someone ordered you to…?”

“Some people have the kind of power that can… it is possible to make certain threats…” Itachi swallows several times. She won’t look at him.

“Danzou,” says Kakashi, a name that means nothing to Sasuke. Itachi doesn’t nod, but a little bit of the tension leaves her.

“If that’s true, I’m going to kill him, whoever he is,” says Sasuke. He hates how his voice won’t stay perfectly level. “You can help, if you want.”

“Not so fast, Sasuke. That’s a hell of a story to confirm. If you ever want your sister to be free again, you’ll need evidence you can present to the Hokage. Itachi?”

Itachi is silent for a moment. In a small voice Sakura says, “There’s nothing about the orders in your file in Intelligence. Do you think Danzou documented them anywhere?”

“Village elders keep meticulous records. Kakashi-san, you’re familiar with the relevant locations, are you not?”

When Sasuke glances momentarily at Kakashi, he looks uncharacteristically grim. “I wonder how you knew that, Itachi. It was just the one base, though. I’m sure Tenzou would be able to tell us more. I don’t suppose you have any witnesses?”

“Just Shisui. And he’s…”

“Dead.”

Itachi looks up, faintly surprised. “No, I believe that for most practical purposes he can be considered a missing-nin. He’s posing as me right now, so that Akatsuki won’t notice I’m gone.” Kakashi narrows his eye at her, and she nods graciously. “His soul became bonded to my sword after that night.” _Which night?_ Sasuke can’t help but wonder. _Which one?_ “Eventually I was able to obtain a body for him. It’s… a clone of me, so there’s no completely certain way for him to prove his identity.”

“That’s why you’re hunting Orochimaru,” Sasuke concludes. In the corner of his eye he sees Kakashi stiffen, and has to suppress a satisfied smile. He didn’t _know_. “You’re trying to destroy the DNA she has so that she can’t…” He frowns, unsure what it is Orochimaru would _do_ with Itachi’s DNA. All it said in her profile in the Akatsuki file was that she did human experimentation. He knows he doesn’t want clones of his sister in her hands.

“So that she does not obtain sharingan,” Itachi finishes.

“We’ll help!” says Naruto, so loudly that Sakura begins to shush him on instinct. “Sorry, Sakura-chan. But, but, you know, we hate Orochimaru too! She’s a traitor and she did all that, and she sounds really creepy, and _you’re_ nice and you’re Sasuke’s sister, so we should help you.” He smiles, pleased with himself, and Sasuke has to look away. What an idiot. He doesn’t know what a promise like that means.

Kakashi cuffs him on the back of the head. “Last time I checked, I was still the captain of this team,” he says. “We’re assets of the village, not free agents. In the worst case all three of you could become missing-nin—and I don’t need to tell you that Naruto and Sasuke are worth a lot to Konoha. We will do this within the rules. If the Hokage sees fit to grant us missions to destroy Orochimaru’s bases—which she will not, because they are A- and S-rank missions—we will go. Otherwise, we will leave Uchiha Shisui and Hoshigaki Kisame to do what they can. Is that clear?”

Naruto and Sakura mumble assent. Sasuke is silent until Kakashi looks pointedly at him, and then he says, through gritted teeth, “It’s clear.”

 

Itachi doesn’t seem to care that she’s under house arrest and forced to go in disguise. Sasuke has never been able to tell what she was feeling; she bore Naruto and Sakura’s ‘makeover’ with equanimity, even when they cut off her hair. And Sasuke will admit, she’s almost unrecognizable. She looks like any one of a thousand dark-eyed young men in Konoha, and something hot in his chest makes him want to hurt his teammates for that. She used to close herself off and become extremely polite whenever someone referred to her as a boy. He thinks sometimes that that only made their father say it more. It made her a better son.

She has been closed-off and polite the entire time she’s been back in Konoha. She cooks for Team Kakashi, rarely speaks, and shadows their missions for fear of being found out while they’re gone. Sasuke thought things would be different after he brought her back, but she only seems more distant than ever. Trying to talk to her is like praying to the moon.

Whenever she doesn’t want to tell him something, she apologizes.

It’s really a relief when she helps them break into Shimura Danzou’s secret shadow-ANBU base: this is Itachi the ninja, Itachi in her element. He hears more words out of her as she’s commanding them to _come this way_ or _wait while I disarm this_ than he has in two weeks. The fluidity and grace with which she disarms Root members makes Sasuke feel like he has a lot of work ahead of him. But she doesn’t kill any; she holds them still so Sakura can put them to sleep with a touch. Some of them are younger than Team Kakashi, which disturbs Sasuke.

It doesn’t matter. It’s good to see her working.

The most secret files, she says (or rather, _implies_ , forcing Kakashi to interpret her cryptic words for some reason Sasuke can’t determine), are in or near the room where Danzou holds court. It will be well-guarded, and even she can’t suppress her chakra completely enough to go unnoticed. She glances down at Sakura, somehow more expressive from behind a blank white mask, and Sasuke grits his teeth. He has been almost completely useless here. It’s Sakura’s skillset that Itachi really needs. Well. At least he’s not a liability, like Naruto.

…Actually, Naruto has been very quiet. Since he started trying to adopt Itachi he’s been shouting a lot less. Sasuke hates him for it, he’s _sure_ his sister spends more time talking to Naruto than to him. And now she’s spent more time talking to Sakura, too.

He’s glad of the mask he’s wearing. He doesn’t have to look away to hide frustrated tears, although sometimes he suspects his sister can see them anyway. “Sasuke,” she says, and he keeps his body language carefully casual as he looks around. “Your chakra control is also good. You should be able to get close enough to put the second guard to sleep.”

When Itachi gives the signal, Sasuke flickers beside the guard on the left and pivots on his toes to stare them directly in the eye. He flexes his chakra before they can do more than reach for their weapon, and their eyes go blank and unfocused. To be safe, he knocks them out with a blow to the temple, and then he pushes up their mask to memorize their face. Kakashi has tasked him with learning to identify as many members of Root as possible, because Itachi may be considered an unreliable witness.

Inside the bare room, they search for several minutes before Kakashi is able to find the chakra-locked hidden door. He’s surprised, but pleased, to find that Sakura has already written several seal tags to disarm the lock and any traps, but he still makes Itachi help him inspect it. Naruto drifts around the room looking into corners while Sakura stands by, tense. Sasuke watches the process with sharingan, but doesn’t get much out of it. After almost ten additional minutes they open the door, and the party goes yet further down into the earth, into an airless chamber packed wall-to-wall with books, scrolls, and filing cabinets.

All of them begin sealing but Sasuke, who is to stand guard. He’s beginning to get nervous after something like twenty minutes. The guards must change sometimes, right? He goes outside, glances both directions down the corridor, and then stimulates one of the guards to wakefulness with a quick pulse of chakra—a trick he learned from Sakura. Before the woman can do much more than tense, he looks into her eyes and puts her under a genjutsu that should make her act like everything is normal. The second guard is trickier, because he immediately scratches Sasuke with some kind of needles before he can be put under. Sasuke inspects the wounds, sure that they must be poisoned, but there isn’t much he can do about it right now. He goes back into the room and waits at the mouth of the hidden passage. “Are you almost done?” he calls quietly, after another tense eternity of waiting.

“Just a couple more!” says Naruto. His voice is second in volume only to Sakura’s shushing. “Sorry, Sakura-chan!”

When he hears their footsteps coming up the stairs, Sasuke turns his head to see them and nearly falls over. So the first thing they see of him is clutching the wall for support. “Sasuke,” says Itachi in a quiet, urgent voice. Her hand is on his elbow and she’s bending over him.

“One of the guards scratched me,” he says, and can’t bring himself to explain more because the whole world is spinning and pressure is starting to build in his head, as if it might explode. She kneels down, taking him with her, and runs green-limned hands over his temples on the sides of his mask. Since when is she a healer? Or has she always been exceptional at _everything_?

“I don’t have experience purging poisons,” she admits. “But we shouldn’t have any trouble getting you out. You have an exceptional team, Kakashi-san. The poison isn’t dangerous, as far as I can tell. If you sleep it off, it should be fine.”

She picks Sasuke up and holds him against her chest. He lets his eyes fall closed, because being able to see wasn’t helping anyway. It feels like he’s falling forever, and he wonders if he’s not dreaming that he’s in his sister’s arms again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think canon leans toward Itachi NOT having been enough of a Root member to have the tongue seal, but she was part of Danzou’s evil plans, so he wouldn’t want her talking. Plus I think it’s very overdramatically Uchiha if she’s not allowed to say anything, and I'm trying to lean into the drama for this fic. Also, yes, she’s trans. If any individual one of my fanfictions doesn’t have at least one trans girl in it, my soul gets reaped. That’s just how the contract goes.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one is funnnnnn

She’s leaning over him when he wakes. “Ane-ue,” he murmurs, and lifts a hand, expecting her to vanish like a mirage.

She looks down unhappily and he feels her take his hand. “Sorry, Sasuke. It’s just me, not Itachi. Remember I said I was going to be her body double? Pretty good, huh.”

He sits up slowly and finds himself looking at the person who claims to be his cousin. That’s right, Itachi cut her hair. He takes his hand back and slides to the other side of the futon to put distance between them. “What are you doing here.”

“I did promise Itachi I’d visit every month. Don’t worry about Kisame, ze’s on a mission right now to maintain our cover. Ze wanted the tour, but we’ll have to do it some other time. Enough about me, though! How do you feel?”

“Fine,” says Sasuke, as if he would tell an unknown potential enemy otherwise. “Where’s Itachi.”

“Making lunch. You were out for about half a day. Ah, I think she really missed having a real kitchen, Kakashi says she’s been cooking nonstop since she got back.” She interprets his narrowed eyes correctly and says, “ _Yes_ , I know Kakashi. He was my captain for a while when I was in ANBU. He was Itachi’s captain too.”

“Kakashi was ANBU?” Now that he thinks of it, it makes a lot of sense. He’d already guessed Itachi was in it, and Shisui, if that is who this is.

“Ah, shit. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. It’s classified, even after ANBU are decommissioned.” He waves his hands in front of him, embarrassed, in a way that pings _Shisui_ to Sasuke. “Forget you heard it. _Anyway_ , Kakashi will confirm my identity for you if you want. I knew enough of his most humiliating moments that he told me he’d believe me if I stopped. D’you want to hear some?”

Sasuke very much _does_ , and is still trying to decide whether to trust this person as Shisui when a second Itachi appears in the doorway. “Sasuke, are you well enough to eat?”

“I’m fine.” He gets to his feet, and finds no lingering dizziness. He follows her into the kitchen, where she has made salmon.

“Cousin, did you do that on purpose? Are you trying to keep your adorable baby brother from learning of his jounin instructor’s youthful indiscretions?”

Itachi lets out a breath that’s on the edge of being a sigh, and starts spooning rice into a bowl. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” She’s so much more expressive than she ever has been. She sounds almost like… like a normal… person. It _must_ be because Shisui is here. “But I’d rather ensure that Naruto doesn’t hear of any youthful indiscretions. Heaven only knows what he would do with that information.” Itachi glances briefly at Sasuke, and he sees her swallow as she turns away. She’d forgotten he was here, and only then could she be comfortable enough to say more than a few terse words. He glares at a piece of salmon and stabs it through with his chopsticks.

 

Sasuke is relieved when Shisui leaves again the next day. Their relationship was always easy when Sasuke was a child, and Shisui seems determined to keep treating him like one. It grates. At least Itachi recognizes his abilities, even if she will barely talk to him.

Sasuke stews on this for a while, but training is a good distraction. Kakashi is away on some mission that requires a single S-class jounin, apparently, and Itachi has stayed home to decode what they pulled out of Danzou’s archive, so there’s no supervision to keep them from totally destroying the training ground. Even Sakura seems pleased to have the chance, though she’s pretending she’s not. Her earthquakes have only been growing more powerful; the shifting, cracking ground is the backdrop of his fight with Naruto, who spits shadow clones like sparks that fly up into the air as birds and dive back down until Sasuke turns them to ash. Sometimes he’ll find that he’s been fighting Sakura the whole time, and only his sharingan will prevent him from getting caught in one of her more dangerous illusions. It’s the closest to _joyful_ he’s ever felt, putting all his skill and energy into improving himself and his teammates.

He grabs Sakura’s wrist, preventing her from making the sign she was about to make. His hand on her arm sparks with electricity, and she disappears into dust, smiling. When he spins around she’s fighting Naruto, both their arms painted with augmentation seals; he lays a genjutsu on the two of them to throw off their measurement of internal chakra usage. Sakura, as expected, dispels it right away. She lets Naruto waste chakra even more flagrantly than usual, a flaming beacon that taunts Sasuke with its limitlessness. At the same moment, Sasuke and Sakura understand that it is now them against him; Sasuke lays another genjutsu to blind him, and Sakura takes out his balance. He manages, with just his feet on the ground and his nose, to hold them off. Until Sakura starts another earthquake.

It’s ensconced in this fierce, breathless joy that Sasuke sees someone step out of the forest on the edge of the training ground. He takes his eyes off Naruto for just a moment to see who it is, and stops. He absently dodges what turns out to be a feint, and finds himself on his knees. “Stop for a second,” he says, holding up a hand as he gets to his feet. Then, louder, “Shisui, what are you doing back here?”

He smiles, and Sasuke’s sharingan catch the unfamiliar way his muscles move under his face. “Is _that_ who you think I am?” says not-Shisui. “Fascinating.”

Sasuke feels Naruto and Sakura go alert behind him. Good, they’re ready to fight too. “Who are you, then? And what do you want?”

“I wonder,” says not-Shisui, stalking closer. “It occurs to me, Sasuke-kun, that I might have _many_ uses for you.”

“Over my dead body!” Naruto shouts at him, and leaps to stand in front of Sasuke, guarding him. Sakura follows suit a bare second later.

Not-Shisui smiles again. “That can be arranged. It suits my needs perfectly well.” His chakra flares, dispelling the genjutsu Sakura tried to lay on him. “None of that, now. You’re simply not at _Itachi’s_ level.” Abruptly, the air seems to be sucked out of Sasuke’s lungs. Sheer _terror_ radiates from the thing that is not his cousin. He sees his own death—can feel blood gurgling in his lungs—

“KAI!” Sakura shouts. The wave of chakra that comes from her is strong enough to momentarily overwhelm the killing intent from not-Shisui. But then it returns, and her shoulders tense as if taking a great weight.

“This will be quite the diversion,” says not-Shisui. And then he’s right in front of Sakura and Naruto, striking out while they’re frozen in fear. Until Naruto’s chakra blooms against his killing intent, just in time for all three of them to scatter. But he moves _so fast_. Even faster than Sasuke. And despite saying he has uses for Sasuke, it’s Naruto he targets.

Sasuke’s heart almost stops when in one fluid motion he pulls a sword out of his mouth and stabs Naruto straight through the chest. Someone like Naruto can heal from that, surely, someone like him—

Sasuke is thrusting with his crackling shortsword before he even realizes that Naruto was a shadow clone. But something in his vision shifts, sharpening the world even further, and giving him the extra fraction of a second of warning that allows him to meet not-Shisui’s sword. It shouldn’t hold up against a shortsword charged with lightning, but it does. Not-Shisui looms over him, still smiling a smile that doesn’t belong on Itachi’s face.

“What a timely confirmation of my theory,” he murmurs. “Their deaths really are the way to awaken the most powerful version of the sharingan. I’m telling you this, Sasuke-kun, so that you will know that you could have prevented it. That it is your fault.”

And he vanishes, making Sasuke stumble forward with the force he was putting into holding his blade against—against— _hers_ , this is _Orochimaru_. _This_ is what she did with Itachi’s DNA.

Sasuke’s eyes frantically search her out, and find her advancing easily toward Sakura over ground erupting with jagged new rocks. When Naruto tries to tackle her, she catches him by the throat and squeezes. Sasuke has never been faster than at this moment, pushing the essence of lightning into every muscle to punch straight through Orochimaru’s back and out the middle of her chest with a crunch of bone, spraying blood over Naruto.

“Never,” he growls, “think you can threaten what’s mine.”

Orochimaru laughs, a wheezing rattle. “Sasuke-kun,” she whispers. “You’ll have to try much harder than that.”

Her hideous chakra swells, her jaw— _unhinges_ —and she climbs out of her own mouth. Like a snake shedding its skin. Naruto drops to the ground and flickers ten meters backward to where Sakura is standing in a defensive stance, as Orochimaru bends to pick up her fallen sword. As terrifying as this is, it _has_ to be a chakra-based technique. If they kill her enough times she will die.

“Team Kakashi!” Sasuke shouts. “Form up at Point Sa!”

Naruto and Sakura, though they are pale and shaking, both nod, and jump into the trees. Sasuke follows them. If they’re lucky, it will take Orochimaru a few minutes to find them again at Training Ground 29, and they’ll have time to strategize. Little as he likes to admit it, Sasuke can recognize that they’re outmatched. He’s almost certain Orochimaru _let_ herself be killed, as an intimidation tactic. And she hasn’t even used any ninjutsu yet. So, as soon as he finds his teammates again he whispers to Sakura, “Send Chiyouda to find Itachi.”

She bites her lip. “Isn’t it better to find more reinforcements?”

“Who else can we trust?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Sakura looks down, and nods, and makes a nick on the back of her hand with a kunai to summon Chiyouda. She crouches to speak to the dog, who softly barks, “Understood!” and tears away through the trees. Sasuke notes with approval that Sakura has chosen a roundabout path that means she won’t pass Orochimaru on the way there.

“Now, quickly. Our strategy.”

“It makes the most sense to run away,” says Sakura. Naruto is about to protest, but she holds up her hand. “I don’t mean like that. I mean guerilla tactics. We’re stalling for time until Itachi-san gets here, so our objective isn’t to hurt her as much as possible. It’s to stay alive for as long as we can. Traps, explosives, sneak attacks.”

“Yeah! Hey, hey, we can do some cool stuff with barrier seals! And you figured out how to store genjutsu in a seal, right?”

Sasuke keeps his eyes open while they work out traps. The two of them are more than devious enough to make it work, and someone needs to keep watch. As he scans the trees for movement he absently wipes his left hand off on his pants; it’s covered in tacky drying blood. And he tries to think if he has any genjutsu powerful enough to stop or misdirect one of Konoha’s Sannin. Itachi has never been willing to advise him on genjutsu (he grits his teeth) but he’s occasionally overheard her talking to Sakura about freeform genjutsu, the techniques that allow you to let an opponent supply exactly how they expect an encounter to play out.

Can that be done with multiple casters?

“Sakura,” he interrupts, and the two of them look up sharply, anxious. “Multi-caster genjutsu. For however long we can hold it. Can you do the freeform technique Itachi told you about?”

“I… I think so. What should we do while she’s caught?”

“Try to kill her as many times as you can. Don’t do your damage all at once—make sure you wait until she creates a new body. That will deplete her chakra faster.” Sakura swallows, and she and Naruto nod.

Before Sasuke can say anything else the point of a sword buries itself in Sakura’s shoulder, and she cries out. Sasuke spins to see Orochimaru ten meters away, still holding the hilt of her sword, which stretches surreally across the clearing. Sasuke flies through the hand seals for the Great Fireball and torches everything in front of him, forcing her to retract her sword and defend.

“ _Go_ ,” he says, and his teammates take off into the trees. He throws more fire at Orochimaru before he follows. He can hear that she’s right behind them; he catches up to Sakura for just a moment on a tree branch, noting the blood seeping out from between her fingers, to say, “Can you still do the genjutsu?”

She nods, panting, and lets go of her shoulder to form the hand seals. Naruto joins in, and they perform the three-person genjutsu. The sounds of pursuit stop, but that could just mean Orochimaru is being quiet now. Sasuke risks glancing back and sees her standing on a high branch with her sword drawn; he can feel her mind struggling against them, and more than once she breaks free from Naruto or Sasuke. Sakura’s grip, though, is iron. “Naruto,” she says through gritted teeth. “See what you can do without releasing your part.”

Naruto grimaces. “I can’t hurt her without breaking her out. If she was on the ground I could draw seals around her with my feet…”

“Can you… ah, can you make shadow clones without a seal?” asks Sakura. From her voice, she’s in a lot of pain. Naruto shakes his head and starts chewing on his lip. And then Orochimaru takes a step forward, off the tree branch. Killing intent spreads from the point of her impact with the ground like a cloud of dust, and the three of them spring away.

What follows is a frenzied game of cat and mice. Orochimaru’s sword shears through the forest like paper; the three of them run; barriers and genjutsu stop her for a while, but she’s too strong to hold for long. They don’t manage to kill her again. She does, however, kill hundreds of Naruto’s clones and give Naruto himself a concussion that leaves him staggering through the trees, leaning on Sakura’s shoulder. Sasuke remains largely untouched, which is the worst part. Orochimaru thinks his sharingan will evolve again if she kills his teammates. Into what Itachi has? How did she get them? But Sasuke scarcely has time to think of anything. He parries sword blows, he breathes fire, he takes attacks meant for his teammates out of spite more than anything. He finds himself boxed in at the foot of a steep hill with Naruto and Sakura still standing, trembling, in front of him, and wants to scream in frustration. Orochimaru takes a step forward.

Orochimaru stops.

Sasuke’s sharingan can pick out the tension in every one of her muscles, as if she’s trying and failing to move. Her eyes are no longer locked onto his, but focused on something just in front of her that he can’t see. He releases a shaky breath and says, as loudly as he dares, “Ane-ue?”

Crows take off raucously from the trees all around them and begin to circle Orochimaru. Half a minute later Itachi condenses out of their dark shapes in front of her and says, “Sakura. Do you have chakra suppression tags?” Sakura runs forward, limping slightly, to thrust a handful of tags at Itachi, who starts sticking them to every exposed inch of Orochimaru’s skin. She doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the fact that Orochimaru looks more like Itachi than she herself does. But Itachi never seems perturbed.

It’s only once Orochimaru and her sword both hit the ground that Naruto allows himself to collapse. Sasuke catches him and drags him over to where Sakura and his sister are staring down at Orochimaru. Now they have a captured S-rank missing-nin who they can’t turn in, because no-one would believe three chuunin managed to defeat her. Somehow in being defeated, she has managed to create almost as many problems as she would have if she won.

He kicks her in the stomach while Itachi isn’t looking.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally, the promised romance in the tags! you have to imagine that an entire separate slow-burn fic is running parallel to this one because I'm never going to write it. content warning: kissing?? content warning: shisui thinks "good at swords" is an acceptable phrase to use while flirting with one of the seven swordsmen of the mist.

Shisui finds Kisame sitting on the steps of the bounty station where they agreed to meet. Ze smells a little blood-spattered, but the black and red cloak does a great job of hiding it. “Did you miss me!” he sings out as he jumps off the roof.

“Welcome back,” says Kisame, in lieu of answering his question. Ze stands and stretches with the crack of popping joints, and picks up Samehada. “Had a good time with your cousins, did you?”

Shisui hooks his arm through Kisame’s, even though ze’s a little too tall for it to work properly. “I don’t know if you can really call either of them a good time,” he says as they start walking north toward Shimo. “Sasuke’s kind of a brat, he used to be _so_ sweet. But then, I suppose I’d be messed-up too if my sister did that. Tch. Itachi’s such an idiot.”

Kisame just hums. Ze rarely gives an opinion if ze doesn’t have to.

“Well, maybe they’ll be a good influence on each other! Itachi is teaching some of Sasuke’s teammates, so you never know. Oh, I should stop thinking about them. Why don’t you tell me about your job?”

“Boring stuff. Killed some people, turned one of them in. One of them had a pretty cool style of wind release, though. She’d throw water into the air and cut it into droplets with her wind. It was kind of like a cut-price water bullet technique.”

Shisui, who has always felt that with a name like his he _should_ have a water affinity, shrugs. He doesn’t know water bullet from hiding in mist. “Sad I missed it. I could use some cut-price water release techniques.”

“Oh? You don’t think my water release is good enough?”

“What? Kisame, you’re like the master of water release. I just like, you know, learning new things. Ehh, it’s kind of Uchiha culture. A self-sufficiency thing. I would have thought the Seven Swordsmen would be into that too.”

“Nah, we used to go on lots of group missions. Our real strength wasn’t as one scary slaughterer, it was as a whole wave of scary slaughterers. You should have seen me and Mangetsu take apart three squads of Kumo nin! Almost as impressive as you and me.” Ze elbows Shisui in the upper arm, and he hides a dumb smile by looking away. Kisame laughs. “What’s wrong? You used to be such a shameless flirt when you were a sword.”

“Well,” says Shisui, reddening, “that was when I knew I didn’t have a chance with you. Quit laughing! I was trained to be ANBU, not some kind of… person who understands social interactions. I’ve just been faking it the whole time.”

“And you faked it very well,” says Kisame genially. “Would you like to kiss me?”

Shisui would _very_ much like to kiss zir. He stares at zir for a moment, trying to work out the logistics, and then forces himself to stop thinking and act. That is, act like someone who knows what he’s doing: imperiously he drapes his hands over Kisame’s shoulders and says, “Quit being so tall and get down here.”

Ze smiles, leans in, and waits. Dammit, ze’s making him do it. He heaves a put-upon sigh to conceal his nerves and closes the gap.

He’s pretty sure this is not how kissing is supposed to go.

He keeps catching his tongue on zir double rows of pointed teeth.

Ze’s laughing into his mouth, which isn’t _fair_.

When Shisui pulls away he’s blushing hotly and pretending to be put out. “Don’t _laugh_ at me,” he says in his best how-could-you injured tone. “I haven’t had the practice that you have.”

“Who exactly do you think has been lining up to kiss me?” asks Kisame, amused. Ze sits down against the trunk of a tree, and Shisui immediately claims zir lap, leaning against zir broad chest. “There haven’t been a lot of Hoshigaki in Kiri since the purges, so even when I lived there I was kind of a freak.”

Shisui is offended on zir behalf. “But like, a hot freak. No-one could possibly deny that you are _super_ hot.” He can’t believe he’s trying to justify this, and can’t come up with anything more specific than _duh, look at the obvious!_ so he just sort of gestures at zir whole body.

Ze has the gall to look surprised and bemused, like no-one has ever told zir ze’s super hot.

“Seriously? For real? No takers? You are literally the most attractive person I’ve ever met. _And_ polite, which I imagine was in short supply in the Village of the Bloody Mist.”

“Yours is not a popular opinion,” Kisame murmurs, “as difficult as you might find it to understand other people’s points of view.”

“It’s a _correct_ opinion,” says Shisui resolutely, and kisses zir again. “One, you’re huge.” Another kiss. “Two, those muscles!” Another kiss. “Three, and I can see how _maybe_ not everyone would agree, but the teeth really do it for me.” Another kiss. “Four, you’re nice _and_ good at swords.” One last kiss, to drive the point home.

Kisame blushes a lovely shade of mauve and tightens the hand that’s resting on his waist.

 

They do eventually make it to a village near Shimo and Kakuzu’s latest drop point. As usual, he has another mission for them. As usual, his partner is nowhere to be seen. But that’s a relief, because no-one wants to deal with the latest one, clearly not even Kakuzu.

“Where are you headed next?” asks Kisame, partially to be polite and partially because it’s just good sense to keep tabs on the rest of Akatsuki.

“Kumo,” Kakuzu grunts. “If you’d bothered to read your assignment you’d know we’re starting phase two.”

“Ah, for the two-tails,” says Kisame. Shisui silently opens the folded mission note and finds that they are to track down the four-tails. It’s accompanied by a picture of its jinchuuriki, an oldish man with a violently red beard. If it weren’t a bingo book picture, i.e., he’s scowling murderously for stylistic reasons, Shisui thinks he’d be a pretty cool guy. Maybe they can find a way to avoid bringing him in.

“We will go, then,” he says, in his flat Itachi voice. “Kisame.”

Kisame waves to Kakuzu, and they leap away further into the village. In fact they’re just going to get tea, but if any snoops see them it should look like they’re talking strategy. Because they are.

“Your impression is kind of creepy,” says Kisame softly over a plate of crackers. “I kept wondering if I’d accidentally sent the wrong Uchiha away.”

Shisui grins at zir. “Maybe you did. Anyway, where do you think we should go for information, if Kakuzu isn’t going to help us out? Do you think there’s enough money on his head that most bounty stations around here would have up-to-date sightings?”

“We’ll need to get our hands on a bingo book. Ambush some shinobi on their way out of Shimo, maybe.”

“Unless he’s only in Iwa’s,” Shisui points out. “Didn’t you say Kiri was trying not to publicize their missing jinchuuriki? Iwa’s even prouder.”

“It can’t hurt to get one from Shimo.”

No, it can’t. It turns out that Roushi of Iwa _is_ in Shimo’s bingo book, but Shisui’s doubtful that whoever wrote the entry has ever seen him. The picture isn’t nearly as good as the one they got from Kakuzu, and there’s no information on his fighting style other than ‘Lava, extremely dangerous.’ Shimo doesn’t even seem to be aware of which bijuu he has.

Still, the important thing is that they have a bounty estimate, which is probably lower than Iwa’s: 35,000,000 ryou, alive only. So yes, bounty stations will definitely have information on him, if there’s any to be had.

They take a little more time with their tea, because it’s not often they get to go to a real teahouse. And then they go.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> naruto tries to be a good friend; sasuke plots to murder everyone he knows; kakashi gets owned. brief discussion of suicidal wishes.

Sasuke is already weary of being in the hospital. Mostly because the hospital staff assumed he wouldn’t want to be separated from his team, when in reality there’s nothing he would like more than to be spared Naruto’s whining while he recovers. That, and they had to tell the staff that they got these injuries while sparring, which though he is the least injured is still a little humiliating.

It’s worse when Kakashi comes back, because even though he has barely contributed to their growth as shinobi or as a team, he seems to feel he’s owed an explanation. “I thought I left you in capable hands when I took this mission,” he says with forced nonchalance. “I see that I trusted too easily.”

“It’s not her fault!” yells Naruto. Sakura throws one of her pillows at him. “Hey! It’s not, though! We were just training, and she was, um, studying at home! It’s not like you _always_ supervise our spars.”

“Actually he does,” whispers Sakura, which makes Naruto whip his head around to look at her, panicked. Sasuke snorts quietly and says,

“I’m sure you’ll find her explanation more than adequate if you ask her yourself.” Kakashi looks at him and raises his eyebrow. Sasuke looks back coolly, willing him to understand.

“Ah,” he says. “Well, I’ll go and question her then. If you behave, you’re going to be released tonight. See you then.” And he waves, and disappears.

Two days later, Konoha’s Copy Ninja reveals that through diligent planning and a stroke of lucky information, he managed to capture the missing-nin Orochimaru. Although Orochimaru doubtless has intelligence that could blow her cover, Itachi makes no objections. She is probably _hoping_ to be found out and punished, for reasons Sasuke still doesn’t understand. He makes Kakashi promise to make Torture and Interrogation promise not to look into Orochimaru’s memories, but he knows Kakashi’s word is worthless if it conflicts with his idea of safety for the village.

Meanwhile, Itachi has finished decoding the documents they got from Danzou’s base. She can neither tell them what she found nor what the key to the code is. She got two characters into writing a string of numbers before her whole body seized up and she sat, paralyzed with a white-knuckled grip on her pen, for forty minutes.

The next day Kakashi has the entire key. He doesn’t mention how he got it, but Sasuke can’t help but imagine Itachi spending the entire night in fits of paralysis, trying to write as many numbers as she could before the next time her secrets froze her. Naruto seems to feel the same, because he ropes Sasuke and Sakura into learning how to make mochi. Because it’s for her, for once Sasuke doesn’t voice any complaints about missing training for something as idiotic as making sweets.

They bring her the tray of mochi where she’s sitting up in bed, reading. She gives a gentle smile to the wall half a meter behind them and eats one. “It is excellent for a first try,” she says.

It’s not actually a compliment, but Naruto beams and promises he’ll keep practicing until they’re just excellent, period.

 

Sasuke insists on having the meeting to talk over the decrypted files far away from Itachi. He fears, perhaps irrationally, that even hearing the information might paralyze her. Before Naruto and Sakura arrive he asks Kakashi, under his breath, “Why does that happen to her? What did Danzou _do_?”

“She hasn’t showed you the seal?” asks Kakashi, glancing at Sasuke over the top of his book. “Well, it’s a bit undignified for someone like her. She has a hexagram tattooed on her tongue that prevents her from revealing sensitive information about Root. But if she’s very circumspect, sometimes she can contrive to give us something.” Sasuke lets out a breath and looks away. “Did you think I made her spend four hours paralyzing herself over and over? I can see by your face that you did. You have such a low opinion of me, Sasuke.”

As far as he’s concerned, it’s warranted. But he doesn’t say that. He does have reasons to be grateful to Kakashi—chief among them the fact that he didn’t turn Itachi in as soon as they brought her to Konoha. He has been actively covering for her for over two months. And, surprisingly, he’s actually going to tell his team what she decoded. So Sasuke says, “Not as low as it used to be.”

Kakashi tries to ruffle his hair, which is inexcusable.

He’s soon distracted by the arrival of the rest of the team, thank heaven.

“Well, is everyone ready?” asks Kakashi. “You may want to be sitting down for this.”

Sasuke’s back straightens without his permission as all his attention focuses on Kakashi.

Kakashi rolls his eye. “Right, yes. What I think you’ll find most interesting is an order Danzou approved on June eleventh, year 64.” He sees Sasuke tense, and nods. “Yes, two days before the massacre.” At that, both Naruto and Sakura start talking at once. Sasuke can’t be bothered to try to distinguish their words. He just wants Kakashi to keep talking.

Kakashi holds up a hand, and the other two chuunin subside, frustrated. Naruto is trying to press himself into Sasuke’s side, trying to comfort him. He doesn’t care enough right now to move away. “There’s also a note from several months previous pinned to the page, about methods of coercion that would be usable on both Uchiha Itachi and Uchiha Shisui. Which we take to mean that Sasuke’s sister did not want to slaughter her clan, but ultimately did anyway.” He looks up and meets Sasuke’s eyes. And doesn’t say anything. Sasuke is the first to look down; Naruto squeezes his hand, and something in his chest burns. He thinks it must be fury. “Danzou,” Kakashi continues, “also made a note, in a separate document, about the eyes he received. Sasuke, I will leave it for you to read. The most relevant thing for the team is that one of them belongs to Shisui. Itachi has requested that we prioritize retrieving it.” Naruto takes a breath to speak, but Kakashi holds up his hand. “We will not be the ones prioritizing. Out of courtesy I told you all first, but the Hokage is the one who will make this decision. Sasuke, have you finished your drawings of the known Root members yet?”

He nods shortly and accepts the piece of paper Kakashi hands him, exchanging it for a scroll containing all the identification drawings. Sakura, to his right, is studying the massacre order. He wants to snatch it away from her. He doesn’t want her to see something so private.

The whole village is probably going to know about it soon. He holds his peace and clenches his fists, then is vaguely surprised to find Naruto still holding his hand. When he lets go, Naruto shakes his fingers out and starts massaging them. Sasuke allows himself a faint grim smile as he folds up the catalogue of stolen eyes and slips it into his pocket.

“Excellent,” says Kakashi. “You will not be coming with me to report this to the Hokage. I take full responsibility for breaking into Root, and I will take any punishment the Hokage sees fit to give.”

Sakura raises her hand. “Kakashi-sensei, if we abandoned you, wouldn’t that make us worse than scum?”

“Yeah,” says Naruto. “Are you trying to tell us to sneak in? Are we looking underneath the underneath?”

Sasuke can’t really help but approve of that, given the exhausted look it puts on Kakashi’s face. He doesn’t contribute anything, because there’s nothing more to say. He just smirks at their team leader until Kakashi runs his hand through his hair and says, “Yes, fine. Twist my own words against me. I try to protect you and what do I get? Ingratitude. Sass. We might as well go now and get it over with. Sakura, give that back. It’s classified.”

Sakura hands back Danzou’s order, and then they get up and run across Konoha’s rooves to the Hokage’s office. They have to wait for her to finish her previous meeting for something like half an hour. Sasuke waits for Naruto to sit down first so that he doesn’t have to be near him. Instead, Sasuke hides himself behind Kakashi and surreptitiously memorizes the catalogue of stolen eyes before scanning it for names he knows. A lot of them he vaguely recognizes, and thinks they were on the police rosters. More damning are the dates of acquisition, starting fourteen years before the massacre order. What could anyone possibly do with over twenty sharingan eyes? None of the Root agents they met while infiltrating the base tried to use sharingan against them. Are they all backups in case he personally loses an eye? Shimura Danzou doesn’t even _fight_.

“Team Kakashi,” says the Hokage’s assistant, appearing around the corner. “Tsunade will see you now.”

As they stand, Kakashi murmurs, “Are you willing to submit that as evidence too?” He tilts his head toward Sasuke, indicating the paper burning a hole in his pocket.

Sasuke takes it out and hands it to him. It doesn’t matter. The whole thing is going to come up anyway, and the sooner Danzou is damned the better. The sooner he’s tried and executed…

Tsunade sits at her desk, fingers steepled in front of her. “Team Kakashi. Here to request another mission? You do know that you can just ask the mission desk. You’ve managed it before.”

“No, Hokage-sama,” says Kakashi, stepping forward. Sasuke doesn’t miss the subtle way his body language shades toward shielding the chuunin behind him. “We have been doing some independent investigation on a tipoff from a former Root agent, and we have come to submit the results of that investigation. Forgive me if it’s in my handwriting, I’m the one who decoded it. I can produce original documents on request.”

“Root,” says Tsunade, eyes narrowing. “ _We_?”

Kakashi silently hands her the folder. She raises an eyebrow at him, but starts to read. As she skims it her eyes narrow even further, and she starts to skip pages. “What is this.”

“An account of illegal and treasonous missions ordered by Councilman Shimura Danzou to be carried out by Root, a secret ANBU branch that he supposedly disbanded six years ago. Many of those missions not only ran counter to the Hokage’s orders, but were intended to subvert Lord Third and Lord Fourth. He hasn’t had much time to subvert you, but if you look in the back you’ll see he’s working on it.”

Sasuke can pinpoint the moment she gets to the massacre order. Her eyes widen and stop moving; the edge of the folder betrays a faint tremor, and she sets it down on her desk. “Who was the tipoff.”

Kakashi doesn’t glance back at Sasuke, but he does pause. “Uchiha Itachi.”

The desk cracks as Tsunade digs her fingers into it. “I don’t know how you could possibly have gotten and _believed_ information from Uchiha Itachi before viewing this file. As far as any of you were aware she was an S-class missing-nin personally responsible for over a thousand Konoha deaths.” Sasuke steps forward, but before he can speak she says, “I do remember you asking after her whereabouts. I wonder how you could have found out.”

“We’re a tracking team, Hokage-sama,” says Sasuke. She eyes him skeptically. “I captured her, and with her cooperation we were able to find out where the information was that could confirm her story.”

“ _You_ captured her. You’re a chuunin. Next you’ll be telling me you captured Orochimaru.”

“No, that was Itachi!” says Naruto cheerfully from the back of the room. An overpowering urge to murder him rises in Sasuke’s gut. Sasuke ignores it. “We had to wait ‘til Kakashi-sensei got back from his mission to turn her in, so…”

Tsunade rests her forehead wearily on one hand. “Of course. You didn’t wait to confirm her innocence before you let her run around the village fighting other missing-nin in secret.”

“She tried to tell us she was guilty,” says Sakura quietly. “I want to know why. It seems like she was trying to protect Danzou for some reason, even though he threatened her. But she won’t be able to tell us until we figure out how to remove the seal.” At Tsunade’s pointed look, Sakura steps out a little further from behind Kakashi and says, “It’s something Danzou put on her that paralyzes her if she tries to reveal sensitive information. It made it pretty difficult to get clues from her. And she didn’t want the investigation to lead back to him, but can’t tell us why.”

“Chuunin, out,” says Tsunade. “Go get Itachi and bring her here. Kakashi, you’re staying.”

Naruto salutes and bounces out the door. Sasuke trades a weary look with Sakura at his inappropriate enthusiasm, and they follow him out. “And for heaven’s sake, make sure she comes under a henge!” Tsunade calls after them.

Itachi is still in bed when they get home, dozing in a square of sunlight coming in the open window. Sasuke doesn’t want to wake her, as tired as she’s been lately, and she looks so peaceful—but apparently Naruto sees no problem shaking her by the shoulder and loudly saying, “Itachi! Hey! Grandma Hokage wants you!”

She’s awake immediately, and Sasuke can tell that she’s ready to kill whoever woke her if need be. “No need to hurry, though,” he says. “She’s having some kind of secret conference with Kakashi.”

Itachi sits up, very alert, and throws off her blanket. Sakura pulls Naruto and Sasuke out of the room by their collars, which Naruto tolerates with some whining and Sasuke with contempt. It’s not like Itachi has anything he hasn’t _seen_ , and he wants to watch her to make sure she doesn’t faint or something. She’s different ever since she came back, like some vital spark has been snuffed out inside her. Occasionally he wonders if she gave something of herself to Shisui to bring him back.

By the time she’s finished getting dressed Naruto has already gotten bored and started raiding the pantry, which Sasuke can’t really be bothered to make him stop. He practically lives at their house anyway, and Sasuke doesn’t feel like arguing about a trivial amount of food. When Itachi emerges from her room, though, Naruto swallows a painfully large bite of his sweet bun and appears by her side like an honor guard. The Naruto-will-die count ticks one higher in Sasuke’s head. Sakura comes from somewhere to speak softly to her too—Sakura-will-die count at three—and Itachi transforms into an even more unremarkable person, a sixty-year-old woman with nut-brown skin and wispy white hair.

She lets _Sakura_ carry her to Hokage Tower like she really is an old woman. Sakura-will-die count at five.

Itachi does hobble up the stairs under her own power, though. It must look strange to the guards, three chuunin to escort an old woman, but they don’t seem any more suspicious than normal. Tsunade, however, is. She cuts herself off in the middle of a sentence when Sasuke pushes the door open, and all he hears is “—handle on your team then—!”

She meets Sasuke’s eyes, stills, and sits back down in her chair. Her hands relax, and she folds them in front of her as the door closes. “Very timely, Team Kakashi. Itachi, would you mind looking like yourself?”

Itachi drops the transformation, and drops to one knee. “Hokage-sama,” she murmurs, looking at the floor. She looks the perfect ANBU agent, and it makes Sasuke feel sick. “I’m sorry for causing you inconvenience.”

“You did a hell of a lot more than inconvenience your clan. Or do you deny that?”

“No. I killed them.”

“Why?”

Itachi looks mutely up at her for a moment, and then says, “I cannot tell you, Hokage-sama.” Tsunade rolls her eyes (treasonous Hokage-will-die count at two) but before she can speak Itachi adds, “But my brother’s team will not lie to you.”

“Why are Uchiha so unfailingly dramatic?” Tsunade mutters. Louder, “Look, Itachi, I would like to believe you had good reasons for what you did. I saw the file written by Danzou. And make no mistake, I _will_ see him executed. But I’m going to need a damn good reason not to execute you too.”

“I have none, Hokage-sama.”

“Note that being suicidal isn’t grounds for execution,” murmurs Kakashi, who is now standing by Tsunade’s side. For once he isn’t slouching; with his arms crossed and his eye narrow, he looks tense and watchful.

“You’d know, wouldn’t you? Well, if you submit to T&I’s memory bullshit, they might be able to pull out something that will help your case.”

“As the Hokage wishes,” says Itachi. She stands up, as if to indicate she’s ready to go whenever.

Sasuke flickers to her side and says, “Don’t let them lock you up in there forever. You _will_ come back.” He says it loud enough so Tsunade can hear, because he’s not stupid enough to directly threaten the Hokage, and this is as close as he’ll come. But quieter, so only Itachi can hear, he says, “You need to help test our next batch of shitty dango.”

Her eyes widen, in surprise or distress, but then the doors open and Tsunade is telling the guards to take her to Torture and Interrogation. She doesn’t manage to say goodbye, so Sasuke just stares after her, feeling like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one contains a time skip! originally it did NOT and it was just an incredibly unsatisfying chapter, which I felt matched Sasuke's attitude. this version has a more feel-good ending.

Danzou’s execution is very public. Tsunade actually has people put up flyers that read, EXECUTION OF SHIMURA DANZOU, TRAITOR TO KONOHA, RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SLAUGHTER OF THE UCHIHA CLAN. It’s repulsively sensational. But if it allows Itachi to be pardoned, Sasuke will live with it.

On the day it happens the enormous raid bell rings four times to gather everyone into the square. Most of the village turns up, because there hasn’t been a public execution in decades—the Third Hokage didn’t believe in them. Someone stands next to Danzou (missing his right arm for reasons unknown) and reads out the list of his crimes—sanitized to exclude the classified information, which is really most of it—and then they ask if he has any last words. The square hushes.

“I did what I did for the security of my village,” says Danzou, in a strong, ringing voice. “The leaves in the sun cannot flourish without the roots in the dark. I did what had to be done.”

“Bullshit!” yells someone in the crowd. As if a switch was flipped, the square suddenly fills with angry shouts, insults and invectives. Danzou stands serene on the platform, as if he can’t hear them. It goes on for several long minutes, until the person standing next to him unsheathes a sword, and the noise begins to die down.

The sword falls.

The platform vanishes, leaving no sign of Danzou or the executioner, and a meter-deep crater in the ground. A moment later there’s a thunderclap, and the screams begin. Later Kakashi will tell them that Danzou was inspected, and T&I already found that trap seal; Tsunade chose to have it detonate at his execution for further drama. To make his death unforgettable, and no doubt to reinforce her reputation as more hardline than her predecessor.

Itachi comes home two days later looking tireder than ever, her arms dark with fresh tattoos. Her chakra, she says, has been sealed; she can no longer mold it, even to augment her muscles. For all intents and purposes she is an extremely skilled civilian.

She spends most of her time in bed reading and the rest cooking. She rarely speaks, but Sasuke is learning to read her; small things make her happy, like being presented with sweets or a clumsy bouquet Naruto has picked. She enjoys watching Team Kakashi train, and seems to find it as comforting as Sasuke does that she is their anchor in Konoha.

She went out shopping with Sasuke once. He ended up breaking two arms and a leg in her defense, because some of the idiots in Konoha don’t seem to understand that she’s innocent.

Three months after the trial Shisui and his enormous sharklike partner appear in the house wearing Konoha forehead protectors, which Shisui seems incredibly smug about. Once, Sasuke overhears him talking with Itachi. “I just rearranged zir priorities a little,” he says. Itachi’s only response is a quiet sigh, and then she tells him to eat if he’s going to.

Irritatingly enough, the two of them move into the house next door rather than the house Shisui actually owns, as Shisui seems to feel he needs to check in on Itachi multiple times per day. Naruto is determined to befriend Hoshigaki, possibly because his misleading nickname makes him sound like a jinchuuriki. In the end, he just learns to use water chakra and becomes even more of a pain to deal with. Sakura, in turn, learns Itachi’s genjutsu, leaving Sasuke to consult Shisui.

Shisui is… okay. Once he realizes Team Kakashi actually goes on missions he’s willing to teach Sasuke some real techniques, like body flicker clone and the attendant secrets about chakra efficiency and stamina that allow him to maintain a flicker for five minutes or more.

 

“Progress?” asks Sasuke.

“ _In position_ ,” Neji confirms over the radio channel. He quickly gets confirmation from the others.

“On my mark then. Three. Two. One.”

The seals break. Naruto launches himself at the boulder with one hand surrounded by a water drill, and it shatters. Before the pieces even have time to fall, the five of them are into the cave. Sasuke catches the exact moment when Naruto realizes that the gasping human form bleeding green light in front of them is the Kazekage, and barely catches his shoulder in time.

“Be smart about this,” he murmurs. “If we act rashly we could put in him in more danger.”

Naruto snarls, vibrating with tension, but he doesn’t move.

“Aw hell, and we weren’t even done,” complains someone standing on the enormous, grotesque statue that dominates the cave. “Leader, permission to engage them?”

“Go, then. We are nearly done.”

As the person jumps down, Sasuke can see that they’re blond. This would be Deidara, then. He’s going to waste their time being showy and possibly monologuing. “Sakura,” Sasuke says quietly.

If he didn’t know her so well, he’d think she was genuinely furious, out of control, as she steps forward and points at Deidara. “You’re going to pay for this,” she snarls. “We’re going to personally eradicate every last fragment of Akatsuki.”

Hidden by her genjutsu, Sasuke slips around the side of the cave, watching Naruto do the same. But Naruto is going to rescue Gaara, and Sasuke’s mission is to incapacitate Deidara. He’s talking to Sakura now, laughing triumphantly about the victory they’re about to take from him.

It goes wrong just before Sasuke is going to strike. Deidara spins and slaps his hand, open-palmed, into Sasuke’s chest. Sasuke flickers several meters backward before he realizes that Deidara hit him with something… sticky. “Did you really think that would work on me?” Deidara crows. “I’ve studied the style of the greatest genjutsu user in the world, specifically to take her down. Your cheap copy is nothing but a waste of my time.” He flips his bangs to momentarily reveal some kind of eyepiece, and brings up a hand in front of him in a half-ram seal—Sasuke barely manages to rip the explosive off his chest and fling it away in time to avoid being perforated.

His eyes meet Sakura’s for just a moment, and she jerks her head in a tiny nod. Deidara might know Itachi’s genjutsu style, but he doesn’t know Sakura’s. And an eyepiece won’t help him except against visual genjutsu.

Sounds of fighting come from deeper into the cave. Sasuke doesn’t dare look, but he thinks Naruto, Kakashi, and Chiyo must be fighting Deidara’s partner to get to Gaara. Now, all Sasuke can do is leave it to them. Deidara’s hands spew dozens of tiny clay spiders, forcing Sasuke to cut through them with a lightning-charged sword. “So you don’t have the skill to do anything but fight me like a coward,” he spits, on the off-chance that Deidara actually has any honor or personal pride.

“I don’t need to, it’s just fun!”

By the time Sasuke makes his way through the spiders to Deidara, Sakura has come in for close combat too. Deidara isn’t good at it, but he must normally be good at dodging—when his sense of balance is working properly. The very first time they trade blows, Deidara stumbles, giving Sasuke time to cut off his right arm and carve part-way into his ribcage. Deidara flickers away in shock, gasping.

“What the hell did you _do_?” he hisses. Sasuke just smiles at him and flexes his fingers, preparing chidori. Sakura will make sure he can’t escape—and sure enough, Sasuke strikes true and comes out with a fist covered in blood and a corpse with a hole for a heart. He wipes his hand vaguely on his flak jacket, wondering why there appear to be _teeth_ on the ground, and gives Sakura a tiny nod. She smiles back and then turns to where their teammates are fighting Deidara’s partner. Despite being a puppet user, he seems distracted enough. Sasuke picks up the Kazekage and heaves him over his shoulder; by the time they get outside, whatever was flowing out of Gaara’s eyes and mouth and into the statue has stopped. He’s breathing shallowly, in uneven gasps.

“Any chance you can pull Chiyo out of the fight?” Sasuke asks Sakura.

“Ugh. Tsunade-sama was so right about how every team should have a medic.”

“So why didn’t you learn medical ninjutsu?”

“Why didn’t _you_ learn medical ninjutsu? You think I should be a medic because I have support capabilities?”

“No, because you seem to actually care whether our team has a medic.”

“Oh, you’re impossible. I’ll try and get Chiyo out here, but Sasori is her grandson and she seems pretty eager to fight him. It’s probably a better bet getting Gaara back to Suna.”

“In that case, just tell them where we’re going and we’ll meet up.”

Sakura gives him an unimpressed look. “Abandon our comrades?”

“You’re still on about that?” Sasuke rolls his eyes. “I don’t think leaving a fight to them that we know they can win counts as abandonment.”

“Stay right there. I’ll give you an area genjutsu and go help them.”

“Because I can’t use genjutsu at all by myself,” Sasuke mutters, but he lets her do it. She’s much better than him anyway.

Sakura makes a face at him and then disappears inside the cave. Crashing noises continue for a few minutes; the occasional torrent of water slops out of the cave’s mouth and into the river. The rest of Team Kakashi and Elder Chiyo walk out into daylight, scarcely half an hour after they arrived.

Sasuke breaks the cloaking genjutsu and stands up, upon which Naruto seems to teleport to his side. “Gaara! Is he gonna be all right, Sasuke?”

“I’m not a medic. Chiyo should look at him.”

Chiyo gives him an evil look. “Best show more respect to your elders, boy. I’m in an ass-kicking mood.”

Sasuke drags Naruto away by the collar so he’ll have to give her room to work. While they watch (Kakashi is talking to the seal-breaking team over the radio) Naruto says, “Did that seem, like, a little too easy to you?”

“You really are an idiot, aren’t you? Of course it wasn’t easy. We’re just that good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that’s the happily-ever-after epilogue we all wanted! Shisui and Kisame get married and do old man things! Team 7 very, VERY eventually realizes that they’ve all been dating for years! They absolutely refuse to leave Kakashi alone to a peaceful retirement, which is secretly what he wanted! Itachi learns to do fucking watercolors or something and spends a lot of time in cafes.
> 
> Thanks for reading and commenting everyone! <3 <3 <3


End file.
